Abstract:

The Audio Engineering subjects of the Telecommunications Engineering degree (specialization Sound and Image), are divided into four modules (I, II, III and IV) that, for greater curricular flexibility, act as communicating vessels. Right at the beginning of the first module, the student is taught to measure the most important parameters that determine the quality of an audio system. To fix that knowledge the lectures are supplemented by practice, measuring actual audio systems: technical parameters to determine the quality of the audio system. The practice is accompanied by a guided tutorial.

Last year, when we conducted an evaluation activity as test-targets, about 75% of the students suspended. We wanted to assess whether students were able to recognize and discriminate information by applying rules, principles and interpreting data. The truth is that, although all the theory had been explained to them and they had been applied to an actual case study, they seemed to know nothing about it.

The practice requires preparation for which we make available all documents through the Moodle platform. Our first suspicion was simply that such preparation was inadequate. In order to check it, a micro multiple-choice test was designed, very basic, to be done by the students right before every practice. The results improved considerably. This test required them to make an effort to prepare the practice. They knew they would be evaluated and this would determine its final evaluation. But still, we do not get the success rate we intended: greater than 80%.

Another factor to consider as a cause of the problem is the limited access to the lab. The student makes each practice for two hours and shared with other six students. Another more of it relating to this failure is the mismatch between the current education system and the new European Higher Education Area. The ECTS contact hours is lower compared to the old credits. The main objective of the new educational system is learning to learn. However, it even inherited much of the formative and evaluative old system activities. The training is based mainly in contact classes and continuous assessment is not what it should. Therefore, the student cannot assume the true value of each ECTS credit and behaves, in a supposedly new system, as if nothing had changed. This explains why before these practices worked perfectly and now no. The problem is not entirely in practices, or wholly on students, but a functional dysfunction of the educational system: the implementation of Bologna education system.
To study the problem thoroughly and fix we requested a project of educational innovation. The main objective was to design a self-learning system and pilot self-assessment that would allow the student to do the practice as many times as wanted and could receive feedback about the correctness of the exercise, about where and/or what was wrong and how to fix it.

The expansion of the actual environment (the lab), not only for doing measurements but also to correct them, is only possible using a virtual environment. This self-learning virtual environment has been programmed using the Python programming language to work as a natural app in their everyday devices.

In this paper we want to share the experience of designing training and auto-evaluation activities (self-training, auto-evaluation) and the improvement achieved in the integration of the subject to the true spirit of the new European Higher Education Area.