Abstract:

Many educators complain about the poor level of the engineering students that we have in the classrooms nowadays. This problem is accentuated in private Latin American universities that depend economically on the tuition fees paid by students for their education in professional programs, where the admission process for the students does not include a rigorous qualification examination. Besides, in the case of engineering programs in Latin American universities many of the admitted students come with poor competences in language skills, in the fundamental basic sciences like mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. The environment has changed, we are in the era of internet, the social networks, the convergence of all communication technologies that has widespread the access to mass communication media. The students have changed, the educators also have to change. All of this makes very challenging the task of educators in engineering programs nowadays. The purpose of the paper is to present an effective methodology for teaching professional engineering courses at a Latin American university that hes been devised to address the problems mentioned before. The methodology is based on several facts recognized by the author in more that twenty years of teaching experience: first, recognize that teachers do not teach, students learn by themselves; second, recognize that the best way of learning is to “learn doing”; third, recognize that the teacher's task is to establish an environment where students can "learn doing", motivate them to learn the subject under study by showing the relevance of the topic in the discipline through real-world applications and guide students in their learning process; fourth, recognize that the evaluation is not just a way to measure whether the students acquire certain competences or not, instead, the evaluation if a essential part of the learning process, the evaluations must be a continuous process in the learning process of the students, must be oriented to essential competences on the topic of the courses taught, the evaluations must be objective and must be followed by immediate and effective feedback to the students; and fifth, recognize that in professional courses it is essential to include real cases of study where the students can “learn doing”, by practicing the methods studied in the course applying them to a real problem, involving computational tools to do so. In the paper, some results obtained by implementing this methodology in the courses of “Flight Dynamics” and “Automatic Flight Control” of the program of Aeronautical Engineering of the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, at Medellín, Colombia, are presented.

Keywords:

Engineering education, higher education methodologies.