An Online Course on the History of Algorithms.

This paper describes the objectives, content, learning methodology and results of an online course on the History of Algorithms for engineering students at Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM). This course is conducted in a virtual environment based on Moodle, with a student-centred educational model which includes a detailed planning of learning activities. Our experience indicates that this subject is highly motivating for students and the virtual environment facilitates competencies development

Evolution and implementation of CDIO initiatives at ETSII-UPM

The School of Industrial Engineering at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (ETSII-UPM) has been promoting student-centred teaching-learning activities, according to the aims of the Bologna Declaration, well before the official establishment of the European Area of Higher Education. Such student-centred teaching-learning experiences led us to the conviction that project based learning is rewarding, both for students and academics, and should be additionally promoted in our new engineering programmes, adapted to the Grade-Master structure. The level of commitment of our teachers with these activities is noteworthy, as the teaching innovation experiences carried out in the last ten years have led to the foundation of 17 Teaching Innovation Groups at ETSII-UPM, hence leading the ranking of teaching innovation among all UPM centres. Among interesting CDIO activities our students have taken part in especially complex projects, including the Formula Student, linked to the complete development of a competition car, and the Cybertech competition, aimed at the design, construction and operation of robots for different purposes. Additional project-based learning teamwork activities have been linked to toy design, to the development of medical devices, to the implementation of virtual laboratories, to the design of complete industrial installations and factories, among other activities detailed in present study. The implementation of Bologna process will culminate at ETSII-UPM with the beginning of the Master’s Degree in Industrial Engineering, in academic year 2014-15. The program has been successfully approved by the Spanish Agency for Accreditation (ANECA), with the inclusion of a set of subjects based upon the CDIO methodology denominated generally “INGENIA”, linked to the Spanish “ingeniar” (to provide ingenious solutions), also related etymologically in Spanish with “ingeniero”, engineer. INGENIA students will live through the complete development process of a complex product or system and there will be different kind of projects covering most of the engineering majors at ETSII-UPM.

The educational learning lifecycle and the cloud computing

Currently, student dropout rates are a matter of concern among universities. Many research studies, aimed at discovering the causes, have been carried out. However, few solutions, that could serve all students and related problems, have been proposed so far. One such problem is caused by the lack of the "knowledge chain educational links" that occurs when students move onto higher studies without mastering their basic studies. Most regulated studies imparted at universities are designed so that some basic subjects serve as support for other, more complicated, subjects, thus forming a complicated knowledge network. When a link in this chain fails, student frustration occurs as it prevents him from fully understanding the following educational links. In this proposal we try to mitigate these disasters that stem, for the most part, the student?s frustration beyond his college stay. On one hand, we make a dissertation on the student?s learning process, which we divide into a series of phases that amount to what we call the "learning lifecycle." Also, we analyze at what stage the action by the stakeholders involved in this scenario: teachers and students; is most important. On the other hand, we consider that Information and Communication Technologies ICT, such as Cloud Computing, can help develop new ways, allowing for the teaching of higher education, while easing and facilitating the student?s learning process. But, methods and processes need to be defined as to direct the use of such technologies; in the teaching process in general, and within higher education in particular; in order to achieve optimum results. Our methodology integrates, as another actor, the ICT into the "Learning Lifecycle". We stimulate students to stop being merely spectators of their own education, and encourage them to take an active part in their training process. To do this, we offer a set of useful tools to determine not only academic failure causes, (for self assessment), but also to remedy these failures (with corrective actions); "discovered the causes it is easier to determine solutions?. We believe this study will be useful for both students and teachers. Students learn from their own experience and improve their learning process, while obtaining all of the "knowledge chain educational links? required in their studies. We stand by the motto "Studying to learn instead of studying to pass". Teachers will also be benefited by detecting where and how to strengthen their teaching proposals. All of this will also result in decreasing dropout rates.

La visita a campo como metodología para el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje

Dentro de la enseñanza de la geotecnia los viajes a campo son una herramienta útil para superar las limitaciones asociadas a la enseñanza en el aula así como para promover el autoaprendizaje del alumno, el cual se enfrenta en primera persona a la información en estado bruto. Mediante esta comunicación compartimos la experiencia de la visita a las obras de construcción de los Túneles de Sorbas y El Almendral dentro del Máster de "Geología Aplicada a la Obra Civil y los Recursos Hídricos" ofertado por la Universidad de Granada, comentando, con un enfoque docente, la planificación de la actividad en función de los resultados de aprendizaje deseados. Fieldtrips are a good tool to overcome the inherent difficulties associated to teaching engineering geology at the classroom and to encourage student self-learning, when they face raw data. In this paper, we share our recent experience with the organization of a fieldtrip to two tunneling construction site (Sorbas Tunnel and El Almendral Tunnel) for the MSc program of “Applied Geology in Civil Engineering and Water Resources” offered by the University of Granada, discussing, with a educational point of view, the planning and learning outcomes.

Development and implementation of a virtual laboratory for training process improvement in the mechanics of continuous media

The project arises from the need to develop improved teaching methodologies in field of the mechanics of continuous media. The objective is to offer the student a learning process to acquire the necessary theoretical knowledge, cognitive skills and the responsibility and autonomy to professional development in this area. Traditionally the teaching of the concepts of these subjects was performed through lectures and laboratory practice. During these lessons the students attitude was usually passive, and therefore their effectiveness was poor. The proposed methodology has already been successfully employed in universities like University Bochum, Germany, University the South Australia and aims to improve the effectiveness of knowledge acquisition through use by the student of a virtual laboratory. This laboratory allows to adapt the curricula and learning techniques to the European Higher Education and improve current learning processes in the University School of Public Works Engineers -EUITOP- of the Technical University of Madrid -UPM-, due there are not laboratories in this specialization. The virtual space is created using a software platform built on OpenSim, manages 3D virtual worlds, and, language LSL -Linden Scripting Language-, which imprints specific powers to objects. The student or user can access this virtual world through their avatar -your character in the virtual world- and can perform practices within the space created for the purpose, at any time, just with computer with internet access and viewfinder. The virtual laboratory has three partitions. The virtual meeting rooms, where the avatar can interact with peers, solve problems and exchange existing documentation in the virtual library. The interactive game room, where the avatar is has to resolve a number of issues in time. And the video room where students can watch instructional videos and receive group lessons. Each audiovisual interactive element is accompanied by explanations framing it within the area of knowledge and enables students to begin to acquire a vocabulary and practice of the profession for which they are being formed. Plane elasticity concepts are introduced from the tension and compression testing of test pieces of steel and concrete. The behavior of reticulated and articulated structures is reinforced by some interactive games and concepts of tension, compression, local and global buckling will by tests to break articulated structures. Pure bending concepts, simple and composite torsion will be studied by observing a flexible specimen. Earthquake resistant design of buildings will be checked by a laboratory test video.

Definición de un proceso para la creación de perfiles institucionales en redes sociales de acuerdo a su estrategia de Social Media Marketing

Desde el 23 de febrero de 2004 la ETS Ingenieros Informáticos posee un perfil en dos redes sociales: Twitter y Facebook. Desde un primer momento el departamento de Unidad de Imagen y Comunicación, encargado de dichos perfiles, ha tenido claro que este era solo el primer paso para aprovechar al máximo las ventajas de las redes sociales en un contexto educativo universitario. En este trabajo se quiere dar forma a esa aspiración desarrollando una expansión del uso de las redes sociales. En este trabajo se analizan los seis primeros meses de trabajo con el perfil de Twitter y la página de Facebook con el objetivo de averiguar qué ha funcionado y qué ha fallado en la estrategia inicial prevista. Primero, se plantea un acercamiento desde el punto de vista estadístico con los datos que arrojan diferentes herramientas de análisis social y después, desde el punto de vista personal con las respuestas de la propia comunidad de la Escuela a una encuesta de satisfacción con los nuevos canales de comunicación. Además, de cara a la creación de nuevos perfiles se analiza el trabajo que realizan en ellas otras universidades y escuelas de informáticas. Con todos los datos sobre el trabajo previo se construyen una serie de buenas prácticas para instituciones universitarias en redes sociales que servirán para desarrollar los planes editoriales de dos nuevos perfiles: un canal de YouTube y una página de LinkedIn. Para terminar, se deja constancia de todo el proceso realizado en una metodología propia que servirá para poder seguir aumentando la red social de la escuela en el futuro con un enfoque en el alumno y que se fundamentará en el análisis y la mejora constante. Se espera que esta metodología pueda servir de modelo para la creación de perfiles sociales en otras universidades o para mejorar las ya existentes.---aBSTRACT---Since February 23rd of 2014, ETS Ingenieros Informáticos had a profile in two of the most popular social networks: Twitter and Facebook. From the beginning, the Communication Department in charge of these profiles knew that this was only a starting point to take advantage of all the advantages that social networks can bring to a higher education context. Thus, this paper aims at developing an expansion of the use of social networks. The present paper analyses the first sixth months of the use of the Twitter profile and the Facebook page to determine the aspects of the initial strategy that worked successfully and those that needed improvement. Firstly, I present a statistical approach the data from a statistical point of view taking into account all the information provided by the different social analysis tools. Then, I complement this first approach with a more personal point of view including the answers of the university community to a satisfaction survey regarding the new communication channels. Finally, in order to create new profiles, other universities’ work is reviewed and examined in depth. Taking into account the previous work, a series of good practices for university institutions is developed in order to be used as the basis of the new social plan to include two new social networks: a YouTube channel and a LinkedIn page. Finally, the whole process is described in a methodology that could be used to increase the School’s social network in the future. This procedure is student-centred and based on the constant analysis and improvement of the results. It is hoped that this methodology could be used as an example of a social network profile creation or improvement for other universities’ strategy.

Virtual Learning Environments In Faculties Of Education In Spain: Changes On Student Attitude

This paper presents some results of a R+D project entitled “e-Learning system for Practical Training of University students in Education Faculties (ForELearn)”, developed in Spain by the Universidad de Granada and the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. In a first phase, through the use of AulaWeb Learning Management System, a set of adaptations and improvements of this software application have been done for the design and development of an experimental course of Practicum supervision. Next, the implementation of this course by means of a group of face to face and online seminars provides experimental data for the analysis and discussion about the point of view of users (preservice teachers) that have tracked their practice supervision with AulaWeb.

Student Reciprocal Peer Teaching as a Method for Active Learning: An Experience in an Electrotechnical Laboratory

Active learning is one of the most efficient mechanisms for learning, according to the psychology of learning. When students act as teachers for other students, the communication is more fluent and knowledge is transferred easier than in a traditional classroom. This teaching method is referred to in the literature as reciprocal peer teaching. In this study, the method is applied to laboratory sessions of a higher education institution course, and the students who act as teachers are referred to as ‘‘laboratory monitors.’’ A particular way to select the monitors and its impact in the final marks is proposed. A total of 181 students participated in the experiment, experiences with laboratory monitors are discussed, and methods for motivating and training laboratory monitors and regular students are proposed. The types of laboratory sessions that can be led by classmates are discussed. This work is related to the changes in teaching methods in the Spanish higher education system, prompted by the Bologna Process for the construction of the European Higher Education Area