José-Vicente Benlloch-Dualde

Teaching computer networks using virtual machines

In this article, a teaching experience carried out with students enrolled in the course “Configuración Administración y gestión de Redes” (Network Configuration Administration and Management) is described. The experience consisted in using virtual machines to install, configure and test network services commonly used in small and medium sized enterprises (SME) and to implement and validate a firewall architecture well-adapted for SME. At the end of the course the students were more self-confident with their knowledge on computer networks and pleased because they had put in practice their knowledge about installing and verifying the proper functioning of commonly used computer network services. The subject was also useful for the students to develop the necessary skills to install, configure and evaluate systems based on virtual machines.

Marketing EIE programmes in higher education towards students from underrepresented groups

Widening participation in higher education has become a major concern for many higher education institutions in order to redress the imbalance that has be created where specific groups in society have over time become underrepresented within higher education. To redress this imbalance, higher education institutions need to set-up and maintain supports to attract more students from these underrepresented groups to enter mainstream higher education. These include the marketing of programmes with targeted access routes into education and to enable full participation once the student has commenced a programme of study (appropriate and targeted supports to be made available). In this paper, specific questions are asked and a review of approaches in marketing programmes and supporting students are identified and discussed. The motivation for the paper is to consider the marketing of programmes within European higher education institutions towards electrical and information engineering (EIE) programmes for students with disabilities.

Motivation as a key factor to improve freshmen academic performance in computer engineering courses

Since 2010 the Universitat Politècnica de València offers the bachelor degrees called “Grados”. The “Grados” follows the guidelines of the European Higher Education Area. Among them are specially relevant those giving students more participation on the education process and incorporating continuous evaluation. Because of the frustrating results obtained by students of the “Physical Fundamentals of Computer Engineering” course during the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 academic years, it was decided to examine strategies to overcome the low academic performance, but maintaining the common assessment policy. The general idea of our proposal is provide students with freedom to prepare their own strategies. To accomplish that, new assessment events were introduced along the term. Thus, students can take a test at the end of each unit, they can also take a midterm exam, combine freely both strategies, or even take a final exam. After applying the proposed strategies, on the one hand the final grades obtained by the students were better than in previous years, and on the other hand, the teacher observed a greater interest in the subject that leads to improve student engagement.

Supporting Instructors in Designing Tablet PC-Based Courses

Nowadays, there are multiple examples of technologies which can drive major positive changes in classroom settings. In particular, the flexibility of Tablet PCs and digital ink has the potential to achieve a wide range of educational goals and promote a more dynamic classroom environment. However, as the possibilities of these educational technologies grow, it seems necessary to consider their role by conceptualizing the knowledge they provide. In this work we propose an approach based on the use of conceptual maps to generate instructor guidelines for designing Tablet PC-based courses. Our approach combines the instructional domain with the technological one in order to offer practical guidelines to design and develop both lecture materials and active learning tasks, providing a systematic and flexible way to organize the teaching process in Tablet PC-based courses. The approach has been implemented in a pilot section during a first year Computer Engineering course with successful results.