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Project-led-education experience as a partial strategy in first years of engineering courses

Abstract:

Recently, there has been a growing tendency to substitute or supplement teacher-centered strategies for others student-centered. These include problem-based learning or collaborative learning. In certain areas, such as engineering, project-led learning collects some of the benefits of problem-based learning and integrates others that are of interest to the formation of engineers. More recently, project-led education as an integral strategy has been demonstrated in several European universities with impressive results. Students have a lower dropout rate, a lower period of adaptation to professional practice and better soft skills. While this implementation requires a general model change, at least at the faculty level, partial strategies applied in specific courses could pick up some of the positive aspects of these methodologies. In this paper, obtained results in a second-year Unit Operations course (grade of bioengineering) by applying this type of partial strategies are discussed. The student's acceptance was good, and both motivation and academic results improved significantly. It was observed a deeper and wider knowledge acquisition in the students. Teacher's workload increased, although, as there was a maximum of 25 students, it was manageable. It was concluded that transition from traditional to project-led learning strategies can be done within a subject without an educational model change at faculty or university level.