ROLE-PLAYING COLLABORATIVE LEARNING TO DEVELOP COMPETENCES IN UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING

Teaching has been traditionally aimed at acquiring specific knowledge by the student to be later applied to solve problems, leaving unattended other generic competences even when they might be of paramount importance during the students' working life. These complementary competences were assumed to be indirectly learnt, so that neither course contents nor formative activities were specifically designed to acquire them. Furthermore, the acquisition of such abilities was not explicitly evaluated either. This paper will describe the practitioner experience of fifth year undergraduate telecommunication engineering students developing complementary abilities. Apart from consolidating theoretical knowledge by putting into practice and evaluating Signal Processing methods and algorithms for multimedia applications, students will develop competences such as decision making, project design, self-learning, analysis and synthesis abilities, organization and work planning, oral and writing skills, critical analysis of results and team working. The methodology relies on a role-playing scheme, where students are asked to act as developers, organizers, reviewers, advisors, and assessors. This teaching experience has been carried out during the second term of course 2009-2010 at University Carlos III, Telecommunications Engineering studies and in the paper we will describe in detail the implementation issues as well as the main conclusions.