Abstract:

Market demands in terms of student skills and student learning needs determine the transition from traditional laboratory practices to virtual laboratories, both in face-to-face and distance learning universities, that has been performed with varying degrees of success, influenced by the type of subject and field of application. The main disadvantages of the traditional approach based on the teacher's explanations in class are, the space/time limitations, the high and repetitive teacher workload, and the reduced student's learning/time invested ratio. Virtual laboratories allow students and teachers the opportunity to acquire knowledge through experimentation without space/time limitations, being their main disadvantages that the skills provided by the use of real equipment are not acquired and, the new technical roles for the development and maintenance of teaching platforms are not always provided.

The engineering teaching programs require the student to dedicate high percentage of the total time to experimental practices in order to have a balanced learning. The reduced class size needed with a traditional approach, makes it difficult to program student/teacher dedication. The perception of overload and misuse of learning time is for both teachers and students.

The aim of this paper is to make a review and evaluate the different approaches in education focused on the “Laboratory Practices” in the construction field, that have been adopted in the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, in order to propose a more adequate framework for learning and evaluation practical classes held in the Airport Laboratory at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Aeronáutica y del Espacio. The learning strategy for the “Laboratory Practice” will be based on two different sort of activities: individual tasks, but also a student’s group activity to do in collaboration with their peers to stimulate cooperative learning, as they will do in a real professional environment.

This study investigates the effects that “blended learning experience” could have on engineer students’ optimization of the time spent in the laboratory and promotion of student self-learning, and also on the achievement. A methodology based on flipped classroom is proposed for practices related to the construction field. Flipped-classroom tries to improve the execution times of laboratory practices; students can organize his own time and learn by himself, arriving at the laboratory prepared to start the experimental part. In the long term, the possibility of the groups being able to decide when to carry out the practice by opening the laboratory in a wider schedule is considered, since it won’t be necessary to gather them to give previous explanations and it will be enough to supervise the activities being carried out, helping them in punctual cases.

Keywords:

Just in time teaching, collaborative learning, flipped classroom, virtual laboratories.