DEVELOPMENT OF AN E-LEARNING PROCEDURE FOR SOLVING ENGINEERING PROBLEMS

The European Higher Education Area involves a change of University teaching models, directing them towards a competency-based learning. These competencies can be specific, which are related to career guidance, or generic, concerning the capabilities and skills the student needs to achieve a complete education. This implies a more active involvement of students in all stages of the educational process, acting not only as a passive recipient of conceptual schemes, but contrasting their ideas with teachers through study, practice and dialogue. Therefore, the EHEA intends not to depend the teaching-learning process on an exam result, applying the concept of continuous assessment.

Moreover, many subjects in Engineering Degrees have as definition of their specific competencies the “acquisition of basic knowledge on the subject and its application to engineering problems”. Because of this, it is necessary to provide the students with a huge number of typical cases in order to improve their ability to acquire these competencies.

When the number of students in a course is very high, as it is the case of Engineering Degrees in the University of Castilla - La Mancha, the use of a virtual platform is a valuable tool for, on one hand, the continuous assessment of students by teachers and, on the other hand, the self-assessment, feedback and communication of students with the teacher. By this way they can develop not only specific competencies but also generic ones such as “Knowledge of Information and Communication Technology” or “Capability to transmit information, ideas, problems and solutions to both specialist and non-specialist people”.

The aim of this work is developing a software tool compatible with Moodle, virtual platform currently in use at UCLM, allowing to a high number of students of the Engineering Degrees a training in solving problems which require analytical equations, without an excessive overload for the teachers involved. This tool can be used for student self-assessment and might also be useful for problems evaluation by the teacher. The tool has been implemented in MATLAB and is able to parameterize certain input values of a problem to obtain different solutions. In this way each student can solve a different problem. Once the student enters the solution in the Moodle platform, it automatically generates a response: “Correct” or “Wrong”. In this latter case, the steps that should have been followed for reaching the correct solution also appears, thus providing feedback to the student.

In this work, different teachers are involved, whose subjects in Electrical Engineering and Industrial Electronics and Automatic Engineering Degrees have a high number of analytical problems.