Learning Power Electronics is essential in both electrical and electronic engineering fields and the introductory courses are similar in many universities. Taking this premise into account, an educational computer-aided platform for power electronics will be presented in this paper. This educational platform includes an e-book, a set of power electronics animations, Java simulations, as well as several hands-on training sessions. The main advantages of this platform are twofold. First, all necessary teaching tools are combined on a single platform. And secondly, access to this platform is available free of charge and with no complicated registration requirements. In addition to traditional teaching techniques, the use of this platform has demonstrated an increase in student participation and has consistently improved their academic performance. Data consist of surveys, which guarantee both reliability and validity through psychometric techniques.
The design and implementation of different Project Based Learning (PBL) approaches are presented in this paper. All of them were carried out in the framework of the MSc degree in Electronic Systems for Smart Environments from the University of Malaga. Four subjects were developed using different values of the three main parameters of PBL: teamwork, self-guided learning and project complexity. During two academic years, several indicators were used to evaluate these experiences: compliance with subject time schedules, scores obtained for the students, interaction of each student in his team and satisfaction of students with the experiences. Our results encourage the use of PBL in bachelor degrees but, at the same time, confirm that PBL implementation is not a trivial task when projects are complex or when a high level of autonomous learning is required from students. Teamwork difficulties have also been found. So, we discuss the need of reaching a minimum level of proficiency in some key competencies before using PBL.
Based on one of the fundamental principles of the educational model of the European Higher Education Area concerning the development of the capacity to achieve lifelong learning, this project has been carried out in which a set of active teaching activities have been implemented for the acquisition of key competences in the challenge of achieving one of the most important objectives that any educational system must provide: lifelong learning. The aim of this model is to facilitate the incorporation of new university graduates into the world of work. This project has been developed in the context of subjects in the field of Electronics. However, in order to facilitate transfer to other subjects, the catalogue of active teaching activities is sufficiently varied to facilitate their extrapolation and use in other subjects, thanks to the fact that teachers have a wide variety of activities to choose from. Finally, a survey has been carried out to evaluate the satisfaction, impact and improvement of this new active methodology in order to find out the students' perspectives once they have worked with this catalogue of activities.
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