Abstract:

The National Agency for the Higher Education Quality (2016) advices to reinforce the actions to close the studies to the professional sectors in order to support the students in their access to the labour market. In this sense, an innovative education action to approach the engineering students to the labor market, by means of the practices of the subjects, using as tools, the ICT and the flipped learning methodology was developed. The action included four steps: The first step was to prepare real study cases of interest for the companies, in which the students worked during the course. Secondly, the students approached the real cases proposed and gave different solutions for the problem, choosing the most adequate ICT to solve the case. By that moment, all the necessary theoretical concepts that the students needed, were arising, and using the technique of the flipped classroom they were facilitated by the teacher. Following with the flipped classroom technology, the third step was the presentation of the solutions adopted by the students, including the ICT used, to the classroom, establishing a feedback from the students and the teacher, in order to consolidate the learning. Finally, the teacher solved and linked the theoretical concepts to the real cases solutions. To assess the impact of this innovation education action; data basis were created, teacher´s focus groups were conducted and students and teachers surveys were carried out.

The teachers remarked, among others:
i) the lack of alignment between the problems that the companies need to solve and the curricula of the students,
ii) the technological companies reticence to share their problems with the academia,
iii) the difficulty of application of the methodology for fundamental subjects and
iv) the difficulty of application of the methodology with students of very different knowledge level.

It was found a higher motivation of the students during the process that could drive to a higher students´ performance. The students appreciate their active participation in the process of design their own subject practices. They also positively marked the use of ICTs, which are familiar technologies for them, to help them to face the problems of the engineering. According to the flipped methodology proposed, the teachers pointed out that it promotes a collaborative and autonomous learning and that the autonomous learning precedes the collaborative learning. The methodology revealed a better monitoring and assessment of the students´ subject practices. The innovative education action concluded an improvement of the practical teaching in Higher Education by the use of real labour market problems, the enhancement of the use of ICT tools to solve them and the improvement of the overall teaching-learning process.

Keywords:

Engineering Higher Education, Practical Education, Labour Market, Flipped methodology.