AUTONOMOUS AND COOPERATIVE LEARNING OF DISCRETE SIMULATION IN DESIGN OF PRODUCTIVE AND LOGISTICS SYSTEMS COURSE

The new study programs within the European Higher Education Area are focused on the student learning giving to the instructor the role of creating suitable environments for student-instructor interactions as well as providing educational materials to students so that they can select, organize and apply the new information adequately. Thus, the most relevant aspects of this new educational model are: teach learning to learn; lifelong learning; autonomous learning; process of learning-teaching as a cooperative work between teachers and students; new definition of the learning-teaching activities; the importance of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and their possibilities to develop new ways of learning. In this context, combining autonomous and cooperative learning is of great interest so that students acquire generic and specific competences such as critical point of view, analysis, active learning, autonomous learning and team work.
This work presents an experience of autonomous and cooperative learning in the course of Design of Productive and Logistics Systems within the Industrial Management Engineering degree in the Higher Technical School of Industrial Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV)). The experience is based on learning discrete simulation with the Flexsim software and the educational on-line platform called Poliformat, implemented at the UPV. Discrete simulation is a technique widely used that has evolved during the last decades thanks to the increment of the computational power of computers. This technique allows modeling and solving problems in an efficient manner than other techniques are not able to solve. In addition, it allows modeling a real system in a virtual and dynamic environment without having this system physically but extrapolating results of the analysis to the reality. In order to facilitate the implementation of the teaching methodology of the subject, the educational platform Poliformat is used. This platform provides an environment for managing educational materials and learning activities such as the management of the laboratory sessions, assignment of tasks and performing the evaluation of students. Then, it constitutes a collaborative tool for autonomous and cooperative learning of discrete simulation in the of Design of Productive and Logistics Systems course.
The structure of the work is as follows. First, it is described the context of Design of Productive and Logistics Systems course in Industrial Management Engineering degree. Then, it is presented the teaching methodology that combines autonomous and cooperative learning of discrete simulation in the Design of Productive and Logistics Systems course by using Flexsim software. The next section describes the resources needed to implement the methodology: educational materials and main functions of the educational platform Poliformat. Finally, conclusions are exposed.