SYNCHRONOUS AND ASYNCHRONOUS DISCUSSIONS. A WAY TO IMPROVE CREATIVE IDEAS IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION

In modern engineering, educators demand effective strategies to foster creativity in students. These strategies should be implemented in the class (face-to-face teaching) and in virtual courses, providing the students to gain new skills adapted to the new technologies.

Although, creativity in teaching has been investigated and there are many papers and methodologies in the literature, very little research has been carried out about the implementation of new technologies when virtual teaching is used. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to study whether the implication of asynchronous teaching can help the students to develop their knowledge and skills in the generation of new ideas. The methodology presented in this work includes the use of asynchronous material developed by the instructors and asynchronous discussions carried out by the students. These learning activities are combined with synchronous teaching and discussions taking place in the classroom. A case-study is presented in this paper where the instructors developed an active learning process using a project-based learning approach. The students, working in groups, are encouraged to use creative methods to generate original ideas using well-known approaches such as Brainstorming, Analogical thinking, Attribute list, etc. To generate new ideas discussion is needed. Thus, the instructors provide two scenarios for discussion. One of them is the classroom, where the students can discuss face-to-face (synchronous discussion). The other one is the virtual course of the subject where they can discuss online the different ideas (asynchronous discussion).

The instructors collect all the information from the asynchronous discussion generated by the students in the virtual course, and this is made in the sequential order. In this way, they can follow the discussion and participation of each student. The results of the study indicated that using asynchronous discussion in project-based learning could help to promote creativity. The influence of the virtual technological context and how it reshapes the way in which the students think and collaborate are analyzed.