Abstract:

After two courses under a constrained teaching context caused by the effects of the pandemic, learning programs at university have been adapted to virtual and blended methodologies while the health crisis restricted the face-to-face attendance. Nonetheless, their goodness have led to the permanent establishment of many of these methodologies during the current academic courses.

The lecturers behind this work have analysed the principal difficulties of engineering students to deal with the acquisition of practical competences in subjects of electronics during different undergraduate courses at university. So far, different actions were taken to tackle such difficulties, which are mainly related to the lack of transfer between theoretical concepts and practical procedures. Over the last academic years, the results of these actions have revealed different levels of success in terms of acquisition of competences, academic performance and satisfaction amongst the students. Altogether with the traditional methodologies applied to the practical lessons, which are very limited in time, and crowded in attendance at the laboratory, have put the focus of the lecturers on the reformulation of the practical lessons of a subject on electronics, within several engineering courses at the Miguel Hernández University in Spain.

In particular, the intervention of this work intends to introduce the use of Youtube videos created and edited by the team of lecturers and owned by the University channel, most of them revising practical aspects of the laboratory, circuit design and circuit simulation. Secondly, this work aims to integrate during the laboratory lessons the use of the online simulation software Tinkercad, all in all within a flipped classroom format that anticipates practical procedures.

Accordingly, the main objective lies in promoting active learning and practical competences of the student for an improved transfer between theoretical concepts and practical procedures. Additionally, the secondary objective pursues designing complementary activities to the laboratory lessons, to be exploited in a flipped classroom format. These activities are thought to be carried out in remote and asynchronous format prior to the face-to-face lessons. Likewise, the ICT, digital resources, media content and activities assigned prior to the face-to-face lessons will alleviate the high occupancy of the laboratories, and thus facilitating the teaching actions and the assimilation of procedures amongst students due to a reduced interaction with the lecturers.

The outcomes are assessed by some learning indicators: the academic performance, the results of the activities in flipped format prior, the performance by participating and non participating students, the satisfaction of students, etc.

The results have been analysed from a comparative point of view by contrasting those associated to the participating students, with those associated to the students who did not participated in the flipped activities. Likewise, a statistical process have been conducted in order to be able to provide robust comparative results, so that certain hypotheses can be raised and/or validated or either rejected. In this way, we were able to extract possible inferences between methodology, participation, use of specific resources, and academic performance to the promotion and improvement of the active skills and practical competences acquired by the students.

Keywords:

Electronics, laboratory, media content.