Francisco Arcega

Modeling the best practices towards the adaptation to the European credit transfer system in technical degrees within the IEEE ES chapter

Several Spanish universities have started their process of adaptation towards a common educational space as a first stage towards the implementation of the credit system as established by the regulation prior to 2010. These universities have developed several highly- illuminating experiences which could be useful to those teachers and institutions who have no previous references and models to develop new experiences of ECTS adaptation. To help these scholars and universities this paper reports on a project that has been recently completed and which has been supported by the Spanish Government and by the participation to the Spanish Chapter of IEEE Education Society. More specifically, the paper provides details about the management of the project, namely, details about the contributions of its three working groups, as well as the different tasks carried out and their monitoring. The paper also describes the results obtained with the project and provides assessment on previous pilot experiences presented by Spanish university teachers at Engineering Education Conferences as well as on the experiences compiled through the projects Web site.

A review of the Accreditation Bodies and Processes in Europe. A vision from the Engineering

Europe has taken the decision of strengthening its cultural links after the successful implementation of the economic union. Many of the states reached the compromise of coordinating their educational policies to create a European higher education space and to promote the mobility of their citizens. Universities play a relevant role in this process. Quality has been considered as an international determinant factor of the competitiveness of Europe. The instrument chosen has been the accreditation of the quality, as in other geographical areas or countries as the USA. This paper analyses the European process to reach the accreditation, the involved agents (like the ENQA European Network for Quality Assurance, and the ECA European Consortium for Accreditation), along with the role of the quality national agencies, as the ANECA (Spanish National Agency for Accreditation) in the Spanish case

Code of good teaching practices based on quality criteria

This paper shows the work developed by the members of EduQTech, an R&D&I Spanish group, in order to apply the quality concept in the classroom. Specifically, the main goal is to define a Code of Good Teaching Practices based on quality criteria. The work is being developed for a two-year period. The teachers involved have become more motivated in their educational research and activities. The main conclusion shows that the philosophy of quality can be applied in the daily teaching activity and the international standards about quality can be used as reference models.

Work in Progress: Modeling the best practices of adaptation to European credit transfer system in technical teachings as improvement to the mobility of students

European countries face significant challenges in crossing international, cultural, and social borders building the common space for higher education. The key in this process, to promote the mobility of the students is the implantation of the European credit transfer system (ECTS). The Spanish universities have begun their process of adaptation of unequal way, with the obligation, in any case, to adapt to the system of credits established in its normative prior to 2010. It is at the present moment, with its forced implementation, when universities require knowing the best practices of adaptation. Some universities have begun with some experiences but all of them look for references of how to do it. This task is not trivial. The objectives for the WIP here presented are to establish a description model of experiences of adaptation on credits ECTS that allows the comparison of all of them and to compile and organize experiences. Later, it will be developed a Web site to disseminate the best experiences

Engineering education research in Spain: A review through the education awards of CESEI — IEEE

In this paper, a review of the educational research that is being developed in Spain is realized in the areas of Electrical, Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics through the works presented to the prizes CESEI (Spanish Chapter of the Education Society of the IEEE) in his three editions. There are two categories of candidates to the prizes, one for the Doctoral Thesis and the second for the Final Degree (or Master) Projects. An analysis of the working areas, the subjects covered as well as the conferences and journals where the results are published has been done. The main goal of this paper is to have a general vision about the work done in such areas of educational research in Spain that will be very interesting for academic staff and researchers.

A survey on modeling and simulation practices for teaching power harmonics

In recent years the undergraduate engineering curriculum of several areas has started to incorporate the study of harmonic distortion on electrical systems. Several education simulation tools have been developed and investigated, most of them a short time ago. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is not any literature review on this topic. In this work, we present for the first time a systematic survey on educational tools to model and simulate the effect of power harmonics on industrial electrical networks. As a result, several improvement aspects have been identified and recommendations and implications for future research have been provided. For that, a retrospective study has been accomplished, showing a growing trend toward simulation and modeling. The key teachers’ perceptions to incorporate these practices are the ease of the teaching‐learning process and the importance of modeling and simulation in the industry. The main research challenge is the conduction of integral assessments that comprise both tools’ quality and use experience, and their contribution to achieve learning outcomes. Statistical tests should be used to validate the academic results obtained. This is a major challenge, since only a few of the existing studies incorporate such tests. Other implications for future research refer to the involvement of a higher number of students in the evaluations and the use of free software in the development of the applications.

Teaching technology with CLIL methodology: A case study

Bilingual English education is increasing in Spain, and especially in Madrid Region. The number of Universities, High Schools and Primary School is higher each year and the demand from Society about this kind of education has made the amount of students involved to grow up exponentially throughout the last decade. In the present paper, the experience in the last two years in the department of Technology of Institute “Ramiro de Maeztu” is described in relation with the technical education of the students attended. CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is the methodology applied to common bilingual subject, but in the case of pre-engineering studies, the methodology is combined with a new perspective of Technology subject focused in innovation and entrepreneurship.

Electromagnetic Compatibility: Learning from experience by means of practical cases

Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) is a very important topic for any professional dealing with electronics. However, teaching EMC concepts faces several difficulties like the fact that several subjects are concerned with it, the lack of time for it or the troubles to realize the effect of interferences. After reviewing the main textbooks and literature, the authors have believed desirable to complete the teaching material with a list of practical cases. In this way, the authors want to improve the efficiency of the teaching-learning process and to show real world problems, identifying the most important EMC concepts that can be left out of engineering curricula. The proposed cases show interference effects on professional equipment or on prototypes of electronic systems but always focusing in practice and with minimal mathematics. Each case is accompanied by questions for students and comments on the way to overcome the problems. The document has been released under an open license to allow other teachers to use it or to include new cases.

A review of teaching power system harmonics

One of the main aspects of power quality is harmonic related problems in power systems. A proper learning of harmonics is essential for power engineers to deal with these problems. This paper reviews the efforts made in teaching power system harmonics in undergraduate and graduate levels. Hardware and software tools have been developed in order to improve the teaching/learning process. General aspects of these tools are presented, as well as their educational methodologies. Conclusions, improvement ideas and future work lines are also launched.

Use of e-learning functionalities: Results of a survey along Spain

This paper shows the results of a survey performed in Spain about the different functionalities of e-learning platforms. This survey was filled in by a group of teachers, experts in Engineering Education along all Spain, through the Spanish Chapter of the IEEE Education Society. The paper shows the opinion on several aspects about the e-learning functionalities, such as knowledge level, usage level, usefulness, etc., as well as the most used platforms. One of the objectives of this work is to create a reflexive debate in the international community about the e-Learning platform use.