Abstract:

New methodologies and materials are required in order to optimize the transference of knowledge between teacher and student, looking for the improvement of the educational process. Nowadays, this process is focused on the student autonomy that is understood as the competence of learning to learn. Consequently, the development of new approaches of teaching should be oriented to reinforce the learning to learn competence.

This work describes an original experience based on these principles of innovative teaching. The experience has been carried out the last two academic years in the subject “Communication Theory” for students belonging to Telecommunication Engineering Bachelor in the University of Jaen (Spain). The main idea is to develop a communication system over the acoustic channel using the multimedia hardware of a PC. The speakers are the transmitters while a microphone is the receiver of the communication system. A program in MATLAB has been developed to be able to perform the transmission and reception over the acoustic channel. Some digital modulations are introduced during this subject, concretely, the family of modulations M-PSK, M-FSK and M-QAM. The simulation software allows the parameterization of some digital simulations in order to evaluate their performance over the acoustic channel.

In this teaching experience, new material associated to digital modulations has been generated and organized following the principles of problem-based teaching. The student revises the material and interacts with the simulator in real-time in order to assert the theoretical concepts. The material and the simulation program are available in the web-based platform ILIAS of the University of Jaen. In this way, the autonomous study is reinforced making use of the web-based resources.

In order to demonstrate the advantages of the methodology, a evaluation was performed before and after the introduction of the new material. The results show an improvement about 0,4 (in a 0 to 5 scale) in the way the students understand the techniques and their associated problems.

Keywords:

Problem-based teaching, learning to learn, student autonomy, digital modulations, acoustic channel.