Abstract
ABSTRACT In today’s industry, employers are looking for civil engineering graduates who have acquired not only substantial technical and scientific knowledge, but who also have good life-long learning skills such as problem-solving, creativity and communication skills. Therefore, it is necessary to leave behind the pedagogical approaches exclusively sustained in master classes in favour of active, experiential and reflective curricula. Thus, a Project-Based Learning (PjBL) strategy has been developed as part of two geotechnical courses within a civil engineering degree in Spain to promote these skills. A qualitative analysis of the implemented PjBL strategy is performed by means of questionnaires and interviews with the aim of considering the participants’ perceptions. The results of the analysis are presented under the following headings: benefits and difficulties of the PjBL, teacher role, traditional teaching methods and measures of improvement. The results suggest a satisfactory implementation, and they have allowed the authors to share the lessons learned from this experience by generating some ‘tips’ for future implementations.
Highlights
Nowadays, industry stakeholders require graduates to have substantial technical and scientific knowledge together with social skills and good problem-solving abilities (Lang et al, 1999)
It may allow participants to communicate the educational value they see in the experience
All participants agreed that the main teaching strategy in Civil Engineering is based on lectures or masterclasses
Summary
Industry stakeholders require graduates to have substantial technical and scientific knowledge together with social skills and good problem-solving abilities (Lang et al, 1999). Cosgrove and O’Reilly (2019) pointed out that under this type of training, some graduates, when dealing with a real world problem, may show procedural expertise with little understanding of how the concepts and principles at play in these procedures relate to each other. This might be due, among other factors, to the lack of a significant problem context of which to make sense and to integrate the disciplinary knowledge (Cosgrove and O’Reilly, 2019). Changes should be implemented in the current engineering curriculum design and teaching practice to promote deeper understandings, to enable critical interactions with the teaching contents, to make connections and to draw conclusions (Brockbank and McGill, 1998)
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