Abstract

 
 
 Teaching how to develop medium size information systems in courses with high matriculation rates is a complex task. In Latin America this is an important issue because, due to high matriculation rates and scarce resources, Schools of Engineering have, in general, very low graduation rates and high drop-out rates. This paper presents the experiences of a team of teachers, during a period of eight years.
 Two strategies were proposed to cope with high drop-out and low graduation rates, and they were implemented and analyzed in two stages. At the initial stage, key roles were defined for each of the members of the teaching staff, focusing on programming assignments and the development and usage of e-learning support systems, such as a course web page and a newsgroup list. At the second stage the main goal was to consolidate the results from the previous stage, but also to make the contents on-line evolve, in order to improve the communication with students and among them. In this second stage it was also important to address the problem of high drop-out/abandon rates, trying to find out the causes and reduce their effect.
 This work proposes a decentralized form of organization of the teaching staff and shows how this makes a difference to make better use of the resources. It also shows that practical work on a project and the transformation to a semi-distance learning course had the effect of lowering the drop-out rates and increasing the approval rates. Finally this experience and the results have an inspiring effect on teachers and educational institutions to improve courses with similar characteristics.
 
 
Highlights
The continuous increase in the enrollment rate of students to the Engineering Programs of the “Universidad de la República” (Uruguay) in the last years has transformed the basic courses into highly populated/massive courses
The results show that there was an increase in the number of active students and a significant decrease in the failure rate, comparing with previous years before the changes in P2 took place (2001-2002). These results indicate that exposing the students to the requirement of designing and implementing a medium size system, give them the necessary background to deal with even harder tasks in Programación 3” (P3), as they do not face this type of systems for the first time in P3
We present the results of the new modality of the course from 2009 and on, incorporating the measures proposed as part of the strategies of the first and second stages
Summary
The continuous increase in the enrollment rate of students to the Engineering Programs of the “Universidad de la República” (Uruguay) in the last years has transformed the basic courses into highly populated/massive courses. Following the trend of other Latin American Schools of Engineering, were there are increasing matriculation rates and scarce resources, they have low graduation rates and high drop-out rates [1] For this reason it has become necessary to adopt new strategies in order to adapt the scholar system to this new reality, since it was not conceived for this context of massiveness and does not have the necessary resources to take care of the students in the same way as before. This paper presents the experience of the group of teachers working in the second basic programming course, “Programación 2”, since the introduction of the first changes in 2003 until 2010. This time span can be organized in two different stages: the first one spans through 2003-2008 and the second one through 2009-2010.
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