Abstract:

Student motivation in engineering degrees is essential to achieve success as these kinds of careers are difficult, conceptually abstract, and long (240 ECTS, 4 courses). In order to have well motivated students in our classrooms, the Bologna process has been promoting different strategies most of them focused in learning-teaching innovation. As an alternative manner to achieve this motivation, our research group has been developing a series of experiences in the line of promoting the student’s integration in the college life (in the broad sense of the concept). Thus, we have already published experiences in integrating students as active members in the learning-teaching process in the classroom, and as members in university research groups. Consequently, it is time for experiencing student’s integration in management tasks.

This paper introduces the experiences conducted with students of the final courses in the Degree of Engineering Design and Product Development at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) throughout the courses 15/16 to 17/18 and particularly those taking part in the subject Sustainable Development and Environmental Ethics. They were given the opportunity to collaborate in assistance tasks to the Students Sub-directorate and the Integration and Professional Promotion Sub-directorate in the Design Engineering School at the UPV. Specifically, they collaborated in the management of the official social networks and the development of improved presentations for Open Days in the School and advertising. These collaborations lasted for a complete course and, as a counterpart, the students received the corresponding credits to the time dedicated to these collaborations as stablished in the specific university regulations.

In addition to the consequent mutual benefit in this kind of collaborations, the obtained results in this experience were very satisfactory as all the participating students passed the subject with higher marks than the average by far. These results encourage us to continue developing motivation strategies to improve the academic results of our university students.

Keywords:

Students, motivation, higher education, management.