Abstract:

Active teaching and learning methodologies have changed the traditional teaching model. These have emerged as an innovative process which stimulates and develops students’ autonomy and critical thinking. Teaching strategies based on active, student-centred methodologies are increasingly decisive in encouraging autonomous and participatory learning through dealing with real problems and situations. In this type of approach, students perform tasks that stimulate them and make them responsible for building knowledge. In this context, problem-based learning allows students to collaboratively solve a given problem situation, enabling them to create new knowledge. As several authors have verified, it is under conditions of true learning that students become real subjects of the construction and reconstruction of the knowledge taught. This is also related to co-creation, a collaborative process that involves an organization and its stakeholders. This process is important for organizations as it allows them to understand how the future will affect their business.

The objective of this paper is to present the experience of the 6th batch of the Demola project which took place at the Polytechnic Institute of Beja, as an example of active teaching and learning methodologies, collaborative and co-creation problem solving, and of University/community relationship development.

Demola was a pedagogical innovation project developed under the Portuguese POCH Program (Human Capital Operational Program) which had two main objectives: one, to train polytechnic and professional higher education professors with methodologies for the co-creation of innovation; and two, to use the Demola methodology in students/organizations’ cooperation projects, involving multidisciplinary knowledge approaches with the aim of helping the organizations understand how the future will affect their businesses and, potentially, find some possible solutions for challenges identified by each team.

The Demola project took place in six consecutive batches, starting in July 2020 and ending in May 2023. Each batch aimed to involve around ten teams of, on average, six students and one facilitating professor. This paper will use the information from the eight challenges of the program's last batch, which started in February and ended in May 2023. The methodology used during the whole project was based on approximately fifteen weeks of teachers' training and, almost simultaneously, around ten weeks of students' training and autonomous work. Over this period, students were required to contact the partner organization, develop several pre-programed tasks, and come up with possible solution(s) to the challenge(s) identified at the beginning of the process. The teacher would only act as facilitator, providing learning situations where everyone learns from everyone else and encouraging collaboration, sharing, and responsibility.
As expected, the different teams faced different problems and dealt with them in many different manners. This led to different results by the end of the project, and some were welcomed by the partner organizations as viable solutions to put into practice.

As students develop a complete project, they acquire practical knowledge of problem-solving methodologies and improve their collaboration and technical skills. Also, they get real-life experience of how organizations work, what problems they face, and how they manage to accomplish tasks with limited resources.

Keywords:

Active learning, Co-creation, Demola, Problem-based learning.