Abstract:

The Bolonia process has initiated the transition of the educational model, from an education centred in the teaching towards an education focused on the learning of the students. This change affects the conception and structure of the degrees and consequently the conception and structure of the courses that compose the degree. One of the main instruments that can aid instructors to adapt their courses to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is the adequate selection of the methodologies used. The new educational model requires that the studies must focus on the development of a professional profile where the students are characterised by different features: active, autonomous, strategic, reflective, cooperative and responsible learners. On the other side, the instructor role is responsible for performing activities such as planning the teaching-learning process, selecting and preparing the contents, providing comprehensible explanations, designing the work methodology and the organizing the work and learning activities, tutoring and evaluating. The selection of learning/teaching methodologies should be focused on bringing over the professional reality so that the outcome results in a profound and long lasting learning. In this sense, one objective is to develop complex mental structures in students so that they become able to deal with a great variety of problems with different degree of complexity.
This paper focuses on the task of designing the work methodologies and organizing the work and learning activities. Concretely, this work shows the adaptation performed on the Design of Productive and Logistics Systems (DPLS) course in the Industrial Management Engineering degree at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV)) with the aim of introducing methodologies akin to the EHEA. In the literature, we can find various didactic methodologies such as lectures, case study, exercises and problem resolution, project-based learning, problem-based learning, cooperative learning and learning contract. Specifically, this work describes the integration of the active methodologies video case study, paper case study, exercises and problem resolution, and cooperative learning with the classical lectures in the course of DPLS.
In the second section, a summary of the most used active methodologies is presented. In the third section, the main learning/teaching objectives, contents and competences are described. In the fourth section, the definition and implementation of active methodologies in the DSPL course are presented. Finally, in the last section, conclusions are exposed.

Keywords:

Active methodologies, engineering, EHEA.