Abstract:

One of the most relevant skills a student in the field of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) should acquire along her or his university career is the ability to successfully face problem-solving challenges involving new concepts beyond the graduation syllabus. ICT professionals, in their everyday activities, should be able to identify relevant new concepts and techniques in their field of expertise, search for trustable and high quality sources of information, and analyse and compare those concepts with already known ones. That is to say: self-learning.

This self-learning capability is more critical and relevant in highly dynamic areas of knowledge as wireless communications: every five years a new wireless communication technology appears in the market. These technologies are studied in the 4th year of the Bachelor Degree in Telecommunications Engineering, in a subject called Mobile Networks and Services (MN&S). MN&S is a very descriptive subject, with very extensive and deep contents, and in a field of knowledge in constant evolution. The students are in the last academic year, close to enter the labour market, where they are likely to have to face the previously mentioned challenges.

Within this context, we have designed and implemented an activity to help the students to acquire the required contents of the subject of MN&S and, at the same time, gain expertise in the general skills of active, autonomous and cooperative learning and oral and written communication. The main challenge of the activity is that the students need to learn a large amount of contents, covering a wide area of technologies. However, active methodologies usually give up contents in exchange for activeness. So we have designed an activity which, besides providing cooperative and active learning benefits, is highly efficient in terms of learning of topics.

The proposed technique, inverted jigsaw, is inspired by a well-known cooperative learning technique named jigsaw. In the traditional jigsaw, the class is initially divided into groups. Each student of the group analyses a different part of the problem, a segment, and becomes an “expert” on it. In a second stage the experts on a segment gather to enhance their knowledge on the subject. Finally, they return to their original group to explain their segments.

Our approach inverts this process. Similarly to the jigsaw technique, the class is initially divided into groups, but each group is assigned a different subject (i.e. a different mobile technology) and they work to become experts on it. When the students have gained expertise in their technology, new groups are created joining one expert student from each technology. In these mixed groups each student gives a short informal presentation about his or her technology and answers questions from the other group members. After this stage the students go back to the original groups and they share the experience of explaining the technology. With this background, each group of experts prepares learning resources and gives an oral presentation on their subject to the whole class, which will be the study material for the rest of the students.

After the experience of running a pilot applying this methodology for two years, we have observed a moderate improvement in the academic results of the students in the part of the course covered by this activity. A detailed analysis is presented in the full paper.

Keywords:

Cooperative learning, active learning, jigsaw, Telecommunications Engineering.