LEARNING EXPERIENCE ON GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING BY USING PROJECT BASED LEARNING AND SOCIAL MEDIA

As part of the process of adapting the Civil Engineering Degree to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) it is necessary to renew the planning of the subjects with the objective of implementing teaching methodologies and educational activities focused on the students, on their skills and on their weaknesses, reinforcing their motivation and their involvement in learning. In this paper, the adaptation of a subject belonging to the Geotechnical Engineering Area, with lectures, seminars and laboratory practice, supplemented by small group tutoring, is presented. For each type of interactive face-to-face session, specifics teaching activities based on Project Based Learning (PBL) suited to the available time have been conducted. In addition, a much more comprehensive project has been designed, incorporating the contents of several didactic units and allowing students to realize the importance of the theoretical and practical competencies that they are acquiring for their future professional activity. In order to ensure proper monitoring of the learning process, small weekly tasks have been scheduled. Each task is associated with the didactic contents previously studied by the students and links with the contents that will be taught in the following lessons, encouraging the student to study the subject with continuity and regularity. The monitoring, the discussion and the evaluation of these tasks are carried out using the official e-learning platform and social media. After completion of the sessions, students were surveyed on their perception of various aspects of the teaching process: the methodologies employed, the use of social media for teaching and their satisfaction with the course. The results obtained from the survey are presented and discussed in this paper. Although there are still some aspects that can be improved, these new teaching activities are shown to be useful for the purpose of increasing the involvement of students in their learning process.