Abstract:

Spanish university is into a converging process towards the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS). In this context, diverse teaching techniques play an important role in education, making the migration process easier to adapt current degrees to new European regulations and guidelines. These principles have been created with the aim of assuring the quality of higher education.

Different active learning methodologies have been considered in a wide range of study cases [1], with the aim of integrating pupils in the learning process. In this way, the classical point of view, based on teaching different topics in lectures, is now criticized, and the teaching community has gradually started to take into account the student participation.

Cooperative learning plays an important role in this field, as an active methodology. With it, students work in groups, which stimulate the members of the group to work in all the tasks of a project. The answer to the problem has to be found by the “Team” [2], what is a key point for future professionals. This is a very important idea in engineering teaching, but it has not been applied too much yet (mainly in practical lessons with limited resources in most of the cases). Precisely, in engineering studies, the use of a methodology that follows this idea, as it is considered Problem Based Learning (PBL) [3], has been crucial to implant these concepts. Some applications of PBL can be found, for instance, in computer science studies [4].

This paper shows the gradual transformation of lectures in the Electronic Technology field, within computer science studies, during the last years, by means of a set of pilot projects towards the European convergence, which have been applied in the different courses. Cooperative learning and problem based learning techniques have been applied in two subjects, observing the trend in the number of students who passed the evaluation, but also noting their attitude.

In this paper main deficiencies of the classical teaching model in engineering lectures are analysed and the different solutions adopted to solve these difficulties are specially addressed. This work also presents several particularities of the learning methodologies and evaluation processes applied in each subject. It is expected that this work serves as a guide for future experiences in similar cases, where the application of cooperative learning must be introduced in a sort period.

Nowadays, our subjects object of study are ECTS compliant, and they are managed by an e-learning platform, powered by Moodle, in order to make easier the application of the aforementioned learning methodologies. This software, and other similar tools, allows an exhaustive monitoring of each student and it is a useful tool to maintain a communication means, not only between teacher and students, but also among students themselves.

Several evaluation results about students enrolled in the analysed subjects in the last four years have been collected. These results clearly show the improvement (especially in the first course) during the years that the active methodologies have been applied. Moreover, this methodology enables the teacher to maintain a high level of knowledge of the subject, something not represented in the empirical results.

Keywords:

innovation active learning, collaborative and problem-based learning, european.