Online experimentation and interactive learning resources for teaching network engineering

This paper presents a case study on teaching network engineering in conjunction with interactive learning resources. This case study has been developed in collaboration with the Cisco Networking Academy in the context of the FORGE project, which promotes online learning and experimentation by offering access to virtual and remote labs. The main goal of this work is allowing learners and educators to perform network simulations within a web browser or an interactive eBook by using any type of mobile, tablet or desktop device. Learning Analytics are employed in order to monitor learning behaviour for further analysis of the learning experience offered to students

Soft Skills Of Engineering Students

Soft skills are a combination of personal qualities and interpersonal abilities that enable individuals to work effectively with others, communicate clearly, and collectively solve problems. Soft skills are required for effective problem-solving and decision-making. Soft skills, such as communication, teamwork, and empathy, are essential for developing a collaborative culture that encourages high order thinking and building relationships. By developing these soft skills, engineering students can improve their chances of success both in their academic pursuits and in their future careers. The goal of the study was to evaluate soft skills among engineering students, to provide insight to educators that can help in designing better activities which integrate both skillsets holistically and efficiently. 92 Students were asked to fill out anonymous Likert-like questionnaire about their self-reported soft skills. The findings 1 Corresponding Author S.A. Aziz [email protected] indicate no significant differences between students based on extrinsic factors (gender, campus, department and class), which may lead to both theoretical and educational implications. These findings can be utilized to formulate recommendations for combine soft skills into the engineering curriculum

Teamwork Development across the Curriculum for Information Technology Students at Liepāja University: Processes, Outcomes and Lessons Learned

Teamwork skills are key feature for Information Technology (IT) specialists. The university IT curriculum contains both IT specific courses, and comprehensive courses. Due to limited amount of the learning courses and efficient achievement of learning goals, it is necessary to look for opportunities to integrate activities developing social and communication skills courses into IT specific courses. Managing the teamwork that is close to practice, it is necessary to solve the problems of teaching and learning organisation, and assessment of individual learning outcomes and competences. In Liepāja University, the student teamwork has been managed for several years as integral part of Software Engineering courses and study projects. The course management system Moodle has been used in learning process providing possibilities to evaluate both assignments submitted by students and their learning behaviour.  The current paper describes and analyses the experience of academic staff of Liepāja University

Accessible C-programming course from scratch using a MOOC platform without limitations

[EN] The C language has been used for ages in the application development in multidisciplinary environments. However, in the academia, this language is being replaced by other higher-level languages due to they are easier to understand, learn and apply. Moreover, the necessity of professionals with a good knowledge in those high-level languages is constantly increasing because of the boosting of mobile devices. This scenario generates a lack of low-level language programmers, required in other less trendy fields, but equal or more important, such as science, engineering or research.  In order to revive the interest in low-level languages and provide those minority fields with well-prepared staff, we present in this work a MOCC C-programming course that is addressed to any kind of people with or without IT background. A feature that differentiates this course from others programming online-based courses is that we mainly focus on the C language syntax providing, via a self-tuned virtual machine, an encapsulated environment that hides any interaction with the command-line of the underlying operating system. A secondary target of this work is to foster the computer science degree students to enrol the computer architecture specialization at the Universitat Jaume I (Spain). For this purpose, the High Performance Computing and Architectures research group of that University has decided to use this C course as a tool for fulfill the gap of the current syllabus. The results show that half of the participants that completed the first session of the course have satisfactorily finished the course, and the number of computer science degree students that chose the computer architecture specialization the following academic course was increment by 3x.This research has been partly funded by TIN2017-82972-R. Adrián Castelló was supported by the ValI+D 2015 FPI program of the Generalitat Valenciana.http://ocs.editorial.upv.es/index.php/HEAD/HEAD18Castelló, A.; Iserte, S.; Belloch, JA. (2018). Accessible C-programming course from scratch using a MOOC platform without limitations. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 1197-1204. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD18.2018.8176OCS1197120

Soft and transferable skills acquisition through organizing a doctoral conference

UIDB/00066/2020.This article presents a 10-year experience of soft and transferable skills acquisition through the involvement of PhD students in the organization of an international conference. Soft and transferable skills acquisition is currently perceived as a core component of doctoral studies. Examples include writing and communication, teamwork, time management, leadership, resource management, negotiation, problem solving, listening, planning, entrepreneurial spirit, mastering ethics awareness, etc. The need for such skills is due to the leading role that doctoral students are expected to play in society. As such, various organizations have issued recommendations for doctoral programs to include a formal component of soft skills training. In this article, an effective way of introducing soft and transferable skills acquisition in doctoral engineering education is introduced. Namely, a form of collaborative project-based learning is designed as a compulsory course. This includes a set of base lectures, a long period of parallel working groups focusing on the various aspects of organizing an international conference, running the actual conference, and performing a post-conference assessment. Results and lessons learned demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed approach.publishersversionpublishe

Towards a learning analytics approach for supporting discovery and reuse of OER: an approach based on Social Networks Analysis and Linked Open Data

The OER movement poses challenges inherent to discovering and reuse digital educational materials from highly heterogeneous and distributed digital repositories. Search engines on today?s Web of documents are based on keyword queries. Search engines don?t provide a sufficiently comprehensive solution to answer a query that permits personalization of open educational materials. To find OER on the Web today, users must first be well informed of which OER repositories potentially contain the data they want and what data model describes these datasets, before using this information to create structured queries. Learning analytics requires not only to retrieve the useful information and knowledge about educational resources, learning processes and relations among learning agents, but also to transform the data gathered in actionable e interoperable information. Linked Data is considered as one of the most effective alternatives for creating global shared information spaces, it has become an interesting approach for discovering and enriching open educational resources data, as well as achieving semantic interoperability and re-use between multiple OER repositories. In this work, an approach based on Semantic Web technologies, the Linked Data guidelines, and Social Network Analysis methods are proposed as a fundamental way to describing, analyzing and visualizing knowledge sharing on OER initiatives

Course evaluation for low pass rate improvement in Engineering education

Abstract : A course evaluation is a process that includes evaluations of lecturers’ teaching performances and their course material moderations. These two procedures are usually implemented, whether officially by the faculty of engineering or by lecturers’ own initiatives, to help identify lecturers’ strengths and weaknesses and the ways forward to improve their performances and their qualities of teaching. This paper presents different ways of implementing these two criteria from students’ and professionals’ perspectives. Official questionnaires from the faculty of engineering, personal questionnaires using Google surveys, Moodle and special designed forms have been used for moderation and evaluations. The process of evaluation is the core of a feedback procedure followed by universities in order for them to monitor the teaching quality of their staff. Satisfactory results show that such a process can improve the lecturers’ teaching performances, courses material quality, students’ satisfaction and performances, and finally the pass rate of the class