Towards a new interactive tool of resources for active learning in university large groups’ lectures

Towards a new interactive tool of resources for active learning in university large groups’ lectures Pons Valladares, Oriol; Franquesa Sànchez, Jordi; Amin Hosseini, Seyed Mohammad In universities these days, numerous different learning methodologies co-exist, from traditional to more innovative, active, cooperative or high-tech ones. Most professors and researchers have difficulties to know, compare and assess all these available methodologies. On the other hand, there are professors who know these methodologies but encounter difficulties in implementing the best activities and strategies for their own courses. This is the case, for example, of young unexperienced professors who start their teaching careers. However, busy professionals who bring their real world experience to some university courses often encounter this same problem. Furthermore, this circumstance also affects researchers in charge of a university course but mainly dedicated to their projects, which are in fields of expertise far away from university learning. In this context, all professors would be delighted to easily discover the best methodology to incorporate in their specific university course, in order to improve their students’ learning processes by taking into account all different conditions involved. These conditions are, above all, thinking levels, number of students, available time, classroom size, hour of the day and professor’s skills. This project aims to develop a new tool full of resources in order to help university professors to choose the best learning activities for each particular discipline, course and case. To do so, this tool takes into account thinking levels, applicability and time constraints, environmental impact, learning process, innovation and satisfaction. This project uses as its starting point the case of architectural technology courses in the Barcelona Architecture School (ETSAB), Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). To define this tool, its designers relied on seminars for experts, who defined a new model incorporating a multi-criteria decision-making model with value functions and a mathematic algorithm. This new tool has been applied for the first time to a third year ETSAB construction course. In this course, the professors have been able to choose the most sustainable activities and strategies for each scenario considering the alternative satisfaction indexes. This first experience has been highly positive because it has assisted these professors to incorporate the best active learning methodologies in their teaching activities and to enable lecturers to manage their classes’ contents and time. In the future, improved versions of this resource tool will have greater interactivity, will incorporate a greater database of learning methodologies and will be applicable to more disciplines, courses and cases in order to keep improving students’ learning processes.