Supporting STEM knowledge and skills in engineering education – PELARS project

In this paper we present our proposal for improving education with hands-on, project-based and experimental scenarios for engineering students with the use of learning analytics. We accomplish this through teacher and learner engagement, user studies and evaluated trials, performed at UCV (University of Craiova, Romania) and DTU (Technical University of Denmark). The PELARS project (Practice-based Experiential Learning Analytics Research And Support) provides technological tools and ICT-based methods for collecting activity data (moving image-based and embedded sensing) for learning analytics (data-mining and reasoning) of practice-based and experiential STEM. This data is used to create analytics support tools for teachers, learners and administrators, providing frameworks for evidence-based curriculum design and learning systems. The PELARS project creates behavioral recording inputs, proving a new learning analytic that is scalable in application, and bridge qualitative and quantitative methods through reasoning and feedback from input data. The project serves to better understand learners' knowledge in physical activities in laboratory and workshop environments, as well as informal learning scenarios. PELARS traces and helps assess learner progress through technology enhancement, in novel ways building upon current research. The project results in learning analytics tools for practice-based STEM learning that are appropriate for real-world learning environments

Developing new electrical and information engineering related curricula to respond to the actual global challenges: the renewable energy curriculum

The Erasmus Lifelong Learning ProgrammeSALEIE (Strategic Alignment of Electrical and InformationEngineering in European Higher Education Institutions) projectbrings together a group of European universities experts aimingto provide higher education models in the EIE (Electrical andInformation Engineering) disciplines that can respond to the keyglobal technical challenges. One of the outcomes of the abovementioned project is related to a new Renewable Energycurriculum. In its early stage the SALEIE project identified theglobal technical challenges the EIE higher education may facenowadays. A survey of existing EIE programmes in the keychallenge areas has been released and their results have beendiscussed during the workshops. The industry feedback related tothe required EIE technical and non-technical skills has been fedwithin the project deliverables and finally two new proposedcurricula on Renewable Energy (RE) and Information andComputer Technology (ICT) Security saw the daylight. This paperpresents the main findings and steps which have been taken inorder to propose a new Renewable Energy curriculum aiming torespond to actual global technical challenges