Abstract:

The recent creation of European Higher Education Area has entailed the appearance of many different master’s degrees, especially in the engineering and technology field. As a consequence, the students which gain admission to those master’s degrees come from different previous studies. This fact makes more difficult to develop an adequate learning and teaching process in the first year subjects of the master’s degrees, because the knowledge of the students in the specific area is usually not uniform, so it is necessary to cover the possible lacks of this knowledge in part of the students, designing a personalized learning process.

An example of this situation in the new master’s degrees is the Geological Engineering master’s degree at University of Alicante (Spain), because students with many different degrees can matriculate in it, like Geology degree, Geological Engineering degree, Civil Engineering degree and Mining Engineering degree.

In this manuscript, the experience in that regard related to the subject “Geotechnical Structures Technology” during the last three academic years is shown. This subject belongs to the 1st course of the abovementioned Geological Engineering master’s degree at University of Alicante (Spain), and it has a total of 4.5 ECTS. When this master started, there was no previous experience of a similar subject in the University of Alicante, so the learning and teaching methodology was designed from the ground up.

In this subject, in general the design of reinforced concrete foundations and their connection with the rest of the structure of buildings, tunnels, bridges, etc., are explained, as well as some types of steel foundations. As a consequence, the students need a wide previous knowledge related to reinforced concrete and steel structures. The master’s students with a Civil Engineering degree have a good preparation to face the subject. However, the master’s students with a Geology degree or Mining Engineering one use to have an important lack of this basic knowledge. Moreover, it is frequent that foreign students come to University of Alicante to study Geological Engineering master’s degree, which increases the heterogeneity of the group.

Then, the subject “Geotechnical Structures Technology” has been designed using a personalized learning methodology depending on the previous formation of each student. For student’s with enough previous knowledge, the exercises and contents are more advanced from the beginning than for ones which have some lacks, whose learning starts in a slower way but at the end of the course, they achieve a similar level to the rest of the students.

Finally, the results of using this personalized learning methodology have been successful until now. Furthermore, this methodology also motivates the involved students, facilitating the development of different skills, which constitutes an added value.

Keywords:

Personalized learning, European Higher Education Area, master’s degree, Geological Engineering, reinforced concrete structures, foundations.