Abstract:

Traditional PBL methodologies that are strongly based on personal interviews and public discussions can be applied successfully to classes with a reduced number of students. However, this is not the common situation in most undergraduate Engineering and Architecture studies in Spain, where classes over 60 students with a single tutor are a standard.

For this number of students, even using working groups of 4 students, the personal interviews between the group and the tutor should be strongly reduced in order to be manageable. Public discussions, especially in a technical environment where all the groups develop a similar project, should be replaced by other more productive activities.

We proposed an innovative approach to the PBL methodology used in our 5th-year undergraduate course “Soil Mechanics and Foundations” in the School of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Madrid. The course had 63 students and, in this case, was taught by two teachers.

In this approach to PBL, the project is not a supplementary activity to the course but the main activity around which the whole course is built. The students are asked to design the foundation of two different real buildings and are provided by the corresponding real geotechnical studies. Each group has slightly different assumptions (geometry or loads) so they should obtain different results.

The goal when applying PBL to technical projects is not only the discussion on the problems that arise when data is not clear or decisions are not straightforward but the correctness of the numerical results. Since the first part may be addressed in a large class, the second part may definitely not (notice that every project has different assumptions and results).

The more relevant aspects of this innovative approach to the PBL methodology are:
• Related example projects to those assigned to the students are explained in the classroom.
• Tutoring will be conducted in the classroom with all the students. Personalized tutoring will only be held when some advances are made in the group work.
• A specific semi-automated feedback system is designed. This system allows the teacher to detect the wrong results in the project and prepare the feedback in minutes.
• Thanks to the semi-automated feedback, PBL is based on a flexible approach, allowing the student to make several deliveries of the work and improving it step by step.
• Virtual channels are strongly used (Moodle courses, tests, and other resources).
• Flipped classroom is used weekly to both stimulate the student self-study ability and to release class time to teaching on projects.

After the experience, most of the students declared to be engaged by the new methodology, gave a positive assessment of their learning, and remarked how valuable this professional approach is for their training.

Keywords:

Project-Based Learning, Large classes, Project training, Collaborative learning, Problem-based learning.