Virtual pedagogical model: development scenarios

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Virtualized Computational Environments on the cloud to foster group skills through PBL: A case study in architecture

The ODISEA platform provides Virtualized Computational Environments (VCEs) on cloud providers as the computational infrastructure to support educational activities. A VCE consists of a collection of one or more Virtual Machines (VMs) to which the students connect from their own computers. In this paper a case study is presented in the architecture domain where a PBL activity is carried out in working groups. The study involves 293 students organized in 28 pilot groups that use customized VCEs created and deployed through the ODISEA platform on a Cloud, and 30 traditional groups that use a LMS platform. The VCE provides the software, hardware and specific configuration to ease the interrelation and cooperative work between the working groups, enhancing the process tracking and feedback gathering as well as providing a better organization of the teaching material. The results demonstrate that the VCE allows to improve the cooperative work, improving the final marks in the PBL developed by the pilot working groups. Also, an economical study is presented, highlighting the economic benefits of the Cloud with respect to raditional physical laboratories of PCs.The authors wish to thank the financial support received from Vicerrectorado de Estudios, Calidad y Acreditacion of the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (UPV) to develop the PIME project "Entomos Virtuales Computacionales para la Evaluation de Competencias Transversales en la Nube", with reference A04 and to the Ministerio de Economia, Industria y Cornpetitividad for the project BigCLOE (TIN2016-79951-R). GM would like to thank AWS for the AWS Educate program that provides the credits required to support the educational activities.Segrelles Quilis, JD.; Martínez Antón, A.; Castilla-Cabanes, N.; Moltó, G. (2017). Virtualized Computational Environments on the cloud to foster group skills through PBL: A case study in architecture. Computers and Education. 108:131-144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2017.02.001S13114410

Transition UGent: a bottom-up initiative towards a more sustainable university

The vibrant think-tank ‘Transition UGent’ engaged over 250 academics, students and people from the university management in suggesting objectives and actions for the Sustainability Policy of Ghent University (Belgium). Founded in 2012, this bottom-up initiative succeeded to place sustainability high on the policy agenda of our university. Through discussions within 9 working groups and using the transition management method, Transition UGent developed system analyses, sustainability visions and transition paths on 9 fields of Ghent University: mobility, energy, food, waste, nature and green, water, art, education and research. At the moment, many visions and ideas find their way into concrete actions and policies. In our presentation we focused on the broad participative process, on the most remarkable structural results (e.g. a formal and ambitious Sustainability Vision and a student-led Sustainability Office) and on recent actions and experiments (e.g. a sustainability assessment on food supply in student restaurants, artistic COP21 activities, ambitious mobility plans, food leftovers projects, an education network on sustainability controversies, a transdisciplinary platform on Sustainable Cities). We concluded with some recommendations and reflections on this transition approach, on the important role of ‘policy entrepreneurs’ and student involvement, on lock-ins and bottlenecks, and on convincing skeptical leaders

Overview of technologies for building robots in the classroom

This paper aims to give an overview of technologies that can be used to implement robotics within an educational context. We discuss complete robotics systems as well as projects that implement only certain elements of a robotics system, such as electronics, hardware, or software. We believe that Maker Movement and DIY trends offers many new opportunities for teaching and feel that they will become much more prominent in the future. Products and projects discussed in this paper are: Mindstorms, Vex, Arduino, Dwengo, Raspberry Pi, MakeBlock, OpenBeam, BitBeam, Scratch, Blockly and ArduBlock

International Student Projects and Sustainable Development Goals: A Perfect Match

Engineering Education is currently going through a transformation, driven by the need for educating better engineers and more engineers, and largely build on elements such as problem orientation, interdisciplinarity, internationalization, digitalization and sustainability. In 2020, the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership EPIC (Improving Employability Through Internationalization and Collaboration) has combined all these elements, and demonstrated how international and interdisciplinary student projects, focusing on solving real-world problems related to sustainability, can be carried out in a setting where students mainly work together online. A total of 56 students from 7 EU and 2 international universities, with backgrounds ranging from Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering to Textile Technologies and Business Informatics were working on 9 different projects throughout the spring of 2020. The paper presents the experiences from the setup and discusses some general recommendations for setting up this type of projects. The paper goes through the stages of defining and carrying out the projects: Defining the overall framework, identifying problems/project proposals in collaboration with relevant stakeholders, identifying the students and assigning students to projects, preparing students and supervisors, organising the physical kick-off seminar, and supporting the online collaboration. We also discuss evaluation and hand-over of the solutions, to ensure the projects have a lasting impact. We conclude that the sustainable development goals provide a highly motivating framework for interdisciplinary, international student projects based on problem-based learning. We also note that a careful design and execution of the all the preparatory stages are crucial in order for the projects to succeed, and discuss specific recommendations for these.</p