Promoting PBL Through an Active Learning Model and the Use of Rapid Prototyping Resources

The transformation of teaching practices in universities remains necessary to better motivate, involve and promote the success of increasingly "connected" students. These new practices can be off-putting to teachers because of the complexity of their implementation. New practices, such as those in the in-verted/flipped classroom model, which consists of reversing the nature of in-classroom and out-of-class activities, are well documented in the pedagogical literature; however, few empirical studies are available that allow us to objec-tively analyze their effect on student learning. As such, university teachers are not being encouraged to change their traditional pedagogical practices. This manuscript proposes a rather simple method, which draws on but is not directly equivalent to the inverted classroom model. The aim here is to re-verse the traditional pedagogical sequence of “Lectures; Tutorials; then Prac-tical work”. This mode of teaching is still very popular in the university sys-tem, particularly in France. More precisely, in the proposed model, teaching begins with practical work, followed by tutorials and finishing with lectures that offer time for questions and debates. This method places much more importance on collaborative working and the consolidation of students’ knowledge and skills. An online course platform called Celene has been widely used to support student learning and to maximize teacher-learner in-teractions. The proposed approach was tested with students of an electrical engineering course in their final year of engineering school. A full six-year feedback period is discussed to demonstrate the interactivity and effective-ness of the approach. The results of the various experiments carried out show that this method “smooths” out some of the difference in student competence. In particular, it is a powerful remediation approach to restore energy to students, who sometimes feel overwhelmed by the traditional ap-proach, which is very transmissive. As a result, the proposed method signifi-cantly reduces failure rates.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…3. Problem-based learning (PBL): This is a student-centered approach where students learn about a subject by understanding and solving problems [11][12][13][14][15]. The PBL process was developed by Howard S. Barrows and Robyn M. Tamblyn in the 1960s as part of the medical program at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Attractiveness of Reversing Teaching Forms – Feedback on an Electrical Engineering Course

Jacques

Lequeu

2020

“…Another relevant work is that of [3], who applied PBL to get students involved throughout each class and the use of the Student Agent Object Portfolio (LAO) course. In addition, PBL was used to improve innovative teaching-learning practices in higher education [4] and also as a pedagogical tool for engineering concerning kinematic analysis of planar connections, in a Machine Mechanics course [5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching of Ordinary Differential Equations Using the Assumptions of the PBL Method

Santos

Xavier²,

Santos

et al. 2020

Mathematics is of fundamental importance to any natural sciences program (be-cause it provides analytical and approximate results that can be simulated and modeled) and perhaps to other areas of human knowledge. Ordinary differential equations are especially of fundamental importance to engineering programs be-cause the modeling of all phenomena of interest for these programs involves Or-dinary differential equations solutions; at the same time, students experience diffi-culties when learning Ordinary differential equations and about their applications to real physical scenarios. In this study, the problem-based learning method was used to study a group of mechanical engineering students at the SENAI CIMATEC University Center. The study analyzes the effectiveness of Ordinary differential equations instruction given through this program using the specified methodology. To consolidate the study, Conceptual Field Theory is used together with an evaluation of the results to observe student behaviors and attitudes in re-lation to actions arising from the method. At the end of the study, a questionnaire was completed by the students, with which they evaluated the effectiveness of the teaching methodology employed.

“…Although, it is normally associated with design teaching [10,11] a number of educators report on application into other engineering courses. The reports in this respect come from different parts of the world; Australia, Americas and Europe [9,11,12,13,14,15,16,17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Application of Problem Based Learning in Mechanics of Machines Course

Uziak

Kommula

2019

The predominant educational methods in engineering education follow traditional classroom teaching, with some elements of tutorials and lab work. Although, there has been a growing tendency in recent years to introduce elements of active learning, and in particular problem-based (PBL) and project-based learning (PjBL). The paper reports on an attempt to use PBL in a topic on kinematics analysis of planar linkages, in a 3-credit course on Mechanics of Machines, offered in Year 3 of a 5-year BEng Mechanical Engineering programme. The aim of this study was to investigate the students’ response and perception to such a learning environment. A survey was administered to investigate students’ views on the application of problem-based learning in the course. The survey proves that the students responded well to the new approach en-joying activity (72%), trying hard (94%) feeling positive (68%), considering time spent to be beneficial (90%) and believing in instructor having best interest of the students in mind (74%). The response was also positive to interest generation and motivation towards the topic; 82% and 78% positive responses, respectively. The students were convinced about the learning new knowledge aspect of PBL. The majority declared learning more by gathering information themselves (66%) and especially more details on the topic in comparison to the traditional lecture/tutorial approach (72%).