Montse Serra

Experiences in Digital Circuit Design Courses: A Self-Study Platform for Learning Support

The synthesis of digital circuits is a basic skill in all the bachelor programmes around the ICT area of knowledge, such as Computer Science, Telecommunication Engineering or Electrical Engineering. An important hindrance in the learning process of this skill is that the existing educational tools for the design of circuits do not allow the student to validate if his design satisfies the specification. Furthermore, an automatic feedback is essential in order to help students to fix incorrect designs. In this paper, we propose an online platform where the students can design and verify their circuits with an individual and automatic feedback. The technical aspects of the platform and the designed verification tool are presented. The impact of the platform on the learning process of the students is illustrated by analyzing the student performance on the course where the platform has been used. Results on the utilization of the platform versus the success rate and marks in the final exam are presented and compared with previous semesters.

Engineering Ethics Beyond Engineers’ Ethics

Engineering ethics is usually focused on engineers’ ethics, engineers acting as individuals. Certainly, these professionals play a central role in the matter, but engineers are not a singularity inside engineering; they exist and operate as a part of a complex network of mutual relationships between many other people, organizations and groups. When engineering ethics and engineers’ ethics are taken as one and the same thing the paradigm of the ethical engineer which prevails is that of the heroic engineer, a certain model of the ideal engineer: someone both quite individualistic and strong enough to deal with all the moral challenges that could arise. We argue that this is not the best approach, at least today in our interrelated world. We have achieved a high degree of independence from nature by means of technology. In exchange for this autonomy we have become increasingly tied up with very complex systems to which we constantly delegate new tasks and powers. Concerns about safety keep growing everywhere due to the fact that now we have a sensitive awareness of the huge amount of power we are both consuming and deploying, thus, new forms of dialogue and consensus have to be incorporated at different levels, in different forums and at different times. Within these democratic channels of participation not just the needs and interests, but also the responsibilities and mutual commitments of all parties should be taken into account.

New ethical challenges for today engineering and technology

New ethical challenges related to feminine values have emerged this century.These demanding ethical values justify the involvement of women in technical fields.Engineering and technical careers will benefit from the added diversity. This paper is about the intersection of three related areas: ethics, gender and the field of engineering. It is important to focus on the attitudes and values woven through this intersection because they become essential for the complete development of the moral life of the engineering profession and of the awareness of the fact that this is a profession made up of both male and female professionals. Thus, specific behaviour coming from the feminine part is necessary in order to contribute to enriching the features of the engineering profile. An approach particularly attached to feminine values, in comparison to the masculine perspective, is a sign of commitment rather than rights, a collective social group rather than the individual and of an ethic based on caring for others rather than the traditional rationalistic arguments. Because of this, the introduction of qualitative diversity within this professional field is an important fact to highlight when women contribute to the engineering community through the enrichment, expansion and transformation of the values and attitudes that are predominant in the people who work and/or study within the area of engineering and technology.

Predictive Analytics: Another Vision of the Learning Process

Teachers are always in need of new tools to support the learning process. Learning analytics has emerged as a solution to provide feedback about the learning progress of students. This solution does not only provide meaningful information to instructors to analyze and improve the learning process, but also to managers and other stakeholders of the learning processes. In this chapter, we extend the vision of learning analytics to predictive analytics. Currently, we are ready to see further in the future and predict the behavior of students based on their actions, and this idea opens a broad potential for educational settings. This chapter discusses challenges, benefits and weaknesses of a predictive system for education. Additionally, the design of a generic predictive system is proposed and experimental results in a real scenario are shown to validate its potential.

On the Design of a System to Predict Student’s Success

Predictive models to evaluate student’s performance have been widely used in the past. These models have been basically used as a statistical tool to predict whether students will pass a course based on previous background variables such as prior-learning or academic records. These models have a large potential to give support to teachers and learners during the learning process in real time. This paper focuses on the design foundations of a predictive core system. This core system is the essential component to build in the future a predictive support framework. Additionally, experimental results are shown to validate the quality of the designed system.

Collaborative Tool to Enhance Quality Evaluation of Higher Education Programmes

The monitoring process and evaluation of an official higher education degree or master is performed by an annual report based on a set of requirements defined by the quality agencies which are responsible to evaluate such quality. Taking into account that these reports are made up by a set of evidences that are gathered during the whole instructional process, we propose the use of a support tool. This tool will allow the improvement of the efficiency of the process and will facilitate the quality evaluation. This paper introduces the collaborative evaluation process applied in our faculty and how the supportive tool helps to enhance the evaluation process.

Acquiring ethical communicative tools for an online ethics training

Nowadays, one of the most dynamic areas in applied ethics is professional ethics (e.g. in the areas of medicine, business and engineering). In this paper, we will focus on the online teaching of professional ethics to undergraduate engineering students, mainly in the specialty of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). More specifically, the pedagogical structure for the ethical training of future engineers will be designed, within an online context, based on a set of ethical communicative tools. Besides, our proposal will analyze which technological resources are suitable to develop the appropriate ethical communicative competences required by the engineering students, when confronting moral conflicts in their daily professional exercise.