Abstract:

At Universidad Veracruzana, “Proyecto Aula” (PA) is the name given to the academic project that sets the groundings for innovation in the institution’s educational model, the Modelo Educativo Integral y Flexible. In PA, the teaching and learning process focuses in the students’ achievement of competencies and their ability to develop complex learning skills. The project has been going on for two years. This work presents the results of the implementation of this project in three different subjects in selected groups of engineering students at the Facultad de Ingeniería / Veracruz. In two subjects, PA methodologies were applied to different groups and the results were compared to those of similar groups of the same subjects, in different scholar periods, taught by the same professor using traditional teaching strategies. In another subject, the comparison was made between one group that worked with the PA methodology and two other groups of the same subject, during the same scholar period, taught by the same professor using traditional teaching strategies. In all cases, explanations of the instructional designs, scaffolding techniques, the incorporation of ICTs by the use of the institution’s web based platform Eminus v2.2, the used evaluation criteria and the achieved results are shown. Students that have taken their courses under the PA methodologies have reported their preference for this new approach to knowledge and skills development over traditional methods.

Keywords:

Competencies, higher education models, teaching and learning process, teaching strategies, instructional design.