Abstract:

The Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) with the support of the Commission for the Evaluation and Monitoring of Innovation Projects (CESPIME) and the Institute of Educational Sciences (ICE), promotes projects for innovation and improvement in education, focussed, among other objectives, on enhancing students learning and comprehensive development.

The incorporation of new teaching staff in the subject Structures 3 (St3), in the Degree in Fundamentals of Architecture taught at the Higher Technical School of Architecture at the UPV, provided the opportunity to implement a teaching innovation project focused on improving pass rates in this subject.

Structures 3 is the last compulsory subject dealing with structural calculations and is focussed on the design and calculation of steel structures according to the Spanish Code. The main aim of the subject is that, at the end of the course, students will be able to design and calculate a complete steel structure, including bars, joints and base plates.

Taught in the ninth semester, it is assumed that the students have previously completed Structures 1 (9 ECTS cr.) and Structures 2 (9 ECTS cr.) in the third and fourth years respectively, while St3 carries a teaching load of 4.5 ECTS cr.

In order to make the course as similar as possible to professional practice, the assessment of the practical part of the subject consists on an open book examination, where the students are allowed to refer to the code, textbooks, their own notes, worked examples and past papers during the exam. This approach shifts the focus toward problem-solving, application of concepts, and critical thinking, being the calculation of the reactions and the internal forces the starting point for the exam tasks, essential to apply the knowledge explained in class.

However, one of the main problems detected along the past years is that the students don’t know how to obtain the reactions and the internal forces in the practical part of the exam. These concepts, that should have been learned in previous courses, are crucial for solving the proposed problems. Consequently, the St3 failure rate over the past four years has ranged between 40-50%.

To change this situation, some progress controls were designed with a series of short questions to be answered in 5 minutes or less, during the class time. Followed by the resolution on the blackboard the tests were assessed by peers. The main objective was, on the one hand, to recognise and reinforce the skills that the students had developed and, on the other hand, to identify the knowledge they should have acquired in order to address their weaknesses.

Unfortunately, in the middle of the semester, the 29th of October 2024 DANA event drastically changed the scenario. Due to the great difficulties in accessing the city of Valencia, teaching began to be delivered online in a synchronous manner, with recorded classes being made available to allow asynchronous access to students with connection issues.

This paper presents the starting point, the proposal for innovation and teaching improvement, and addresses the required adaptation following the 29th of October 2024 DANA event.

Keywords:

Steel structures, self-assessment, Remote learning, problem solving, natural hazards.