An educational software for teaching soil consolidation

The educational tool SICOMED_3D has been created to simulate problems of soil consolidation by prefabricated vertical drains. Thanks to its nice interface of windows, the introduction of data is very fast and easy for the students, while providing users with simple handling and powerful calculations. Its graphical environment allows to get representations of the excess pore pressure, local settlements and total surface settlement. SICOMED_3D can also generate an animation that recreates the evolution of the surface settlement during the consolidation process. The software presents, like commercial softwares, the most common options (e.g., save and open cases files, save animations and representations, etc.). Although the program is created to be used in several fields, among others as an engineering or research tool, the main use of interest for this work is for educational purposes. Another important application is as low-cost laboratory practices, as students can experiment by modifying the soil properties, including the depth of penetration of the vertical drain, in a quick, simple and intuitive way.

Student Auditing of University Social Responsibility - Reform through Reflective, Experiential Learning?

The emphasis on the social responsibility of higher education institutions emerged more systematically in the Post-Bologna European context. This paper presents an overview of a case study on a certificate in university social responsibility auditing, based on three European universities: Edimburgh, Kaunas and Porto. The goal is to develop an auditor training for students based on experiential learning, that is coherent and replicable in diverse contexts and that involves the various stakeholders. The project is based on a set of benchmarks of university social responsibility developed in the context of a European project, namely: Research, Teaching, Support for Learning and Public Engagement; Governance; Environmental and Societal Sustainability; and Fair Practices. We will report on the initial data generated by the ESSA Project, in respect of student recruitment, baseline attitudes and the impact of participation in the training and the first audit.

Comparison of traditional lecture and flipped classroom for teaching programming

Programming courses in undergraduate education seem to be predestined for a flipped classroom approach as learning programming requires a high personal contribution on the one hand and on the other hand, course participants typically start with a wide range of previous knowledge and skills. Within a flipped classroom students can organize their learning phases self-reliantly and put an individual amount of effort into each learning objective. Whilst in a traditional lecture it is not easy to motivate students, the flipped classroom requires students’ active involvement per se. Besides all these advantages, setting up such a course requires a high initial effort for the lecturer. Furthermore, students might prefer a lecture, as usually the work load is higher in a comparable flipped classroom course. Based on the idea of flipping a beginners programming course, we firstly explored the effects of a flipped classroom approach on an elective advanced pro­gram­ming course with a smaller student group. The paper compares the new course design and its effects on the students learning, on the teaching, as well as on the course preparation with the former traditional lecture. The com­parison is based on a survey, the students’ evaluation feedback and on the examination results.

Public Higher Education Governing Boards Composition and Regional Difference in U.S.

Using The Public Higher Education Boards Database designed by Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) in 2008, this paper reviewed prior studies of governing boards and investigated regional differences of boards' characteristics including board type, selection method, board composition, provision condition, term length, supervision, and meeting frequency. The results show tha: (1) highly centralized state university governance with more political control exist in West and Middle West; (2) governing boards in Northeast are more autonomous with high percentage of alumni and self-perpetuating members and less political affiliations; (3) more faculty participations appear in South and West, and most Middle West boards do not have removal process and longer length of term.

Using open software to teach resource assessment of solar thermal and geothermal energy

The students of the Faculties of Engineering of the Universitty of Basque Country (Gipuzkoa-Eibar and Bilbao) in the last years of their studies, before becoming engineers, have the opportunity to select a block of subjects intended to enhance their knowledge on renewable energy systems. One of these subjects is Solar Thermal and Geothermal energy. These subjects are devoted to assessing the renewable energy resource, and designing optimal systems. Apart from the transmission of good practices, the focus is practical and is based on hands-on computer real-life exercises, which involves not only intensive programming using high-level software, but also the spatial representation of results. To that purpose two main open source codes are used: Octave (https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/), and QGIS (https://www.qgis.org/). Students learn how to address real-life problems regarding the geographical representation of solar radiation and low temperature geothermal resources using QGIS, and solar thermal system modelling using Octave.

Teachers’ perceptions about their practices and needs for improvement: A qualitative research project at the University of Padova

The aim of the paper is to present the results deriving from the qualitative analysis of open-ended questions included in the Prodid Project Questionnaire. Prodid (Teacher professional development and academic educational innovation) is a research project conducted in 2014-2015 at the University of Padova, which aimed at developing strategies to support academic teachers to enhance their teaching competences. The questions were formulated in order to collect teachers’ points of view on excellence and innovation, perceived critical aspects in their teaching practice and the need for support to improve teaching. The analysis was conducted through the use of software Atlas.ti 7 in order to highlight, on the one hand, the strengths and weaknesses of current teaching practices, and on the other hand, the need of support to improve teaching skills and enhance teachers’ professionalism. Findings are presented by illustrating the distributions based on the different Schools in the universities as well as the thematic issues that emerged from teachers’ answers. These results informed the professional development activities organized at the University for junior and senior staff in 2015.

Using open software to teach resource assessment of renewable energies

The students of the Faculties of Engineering of the Universitty of Basque Country (Gipuzkoa-Eibar and Bilbao) in the last years of their studies, before becoming engineers, have the opportunity to select a block of subjects intended to enhance their knowledge on Wind Energy, Ocean Energy, Biomass and Hydraulic Energy. These subjects are devoted to different aspects of the water cycle management, and geographical representations of wind, ocean and biomass energy resource. Apart from the transmission of good practices, the focus is practical and is based on hands-on computer real-life exercises, which involves not only intensive programming using high-level software, but also the spatial representation of results. To that purpose three main open source codes are used: EPANET (https://www.epa.gov/water-research/epanet), QGIS (https://www.qgis.org/) and R (https://www.cran.r-project.org/). Students learn how to address real-life problems regarding the correct calculation of water distribution networks with EPANET, geographical representation of wind and ocean energy resource with R, and spatial representation of biomass resource with QGIS.

Insights into the expectations of mobility students: the impact of Erasmus in their future professional careers

At the celebration of its 30th anniversary, Erasmus is recognised as the most successful exchange program ever implemented. The prospects of attaining a common European consciousness challenged the program's ability to blend together knowledge, attitudes and skills in a winning combination. It is no longer sufficient to communicate and integrate: mobility should actively foster skills to support students's professional career at national and international levels. Although literature on mobility is vast and interesting, studies on the impact of the mobility experience in the students' future employability profile rarely provide first-hand data on their expectations in this regard. This exploratory research comprises a qualitative focus group approach with Erasmus students during their exchange period in a Portuguese university and collected some insightful data on how students consider their mobility in terms of new learning outcomes, the professional value of the experience and the development of new skills. Results indicate that students seem to be quite aware of the positive implications of mobility in their professional careers and of the set of skills developed during that period. Overall, this article contributes to demonstrating the importance of assessing skills development during Erasmus mobility experiences. Managerial implications and suggestions for future research are provided.

Impact of a teacher development programme on approaches to teaching in higher education

The Bologna process involved a strategic change that included in its policy agenda a move towards a student-centred scenario. In addition, a reasonable association may be assumed to exist between teaching development programmes and student learning outcomes. This research study focused on the impact that a brief yet intense formal and non-qualifying teaching programme, delivered as a seminar and supported by the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) in Spain, had on teachers’ approaches to teaching measured by the most recent Spanish adaptation of the Approaches to Teaching Inventory (S-ATI-20). Results showed that there was a positive and statistically significant impact of the training programme on approaches to teaching measured by the information transmission/teacher-focused scale (ITTF). The poor attendance rate to this non-compulsory programme, course duration, participant profile, psychometric structure of the questionnaire used, and the relationship between teaching development programmes and approaches to teaching are discussed.

Automated Program Analysis for Novice Programmers

This paper describes how to adapt a static code analyzer to provide feedback novice programmers and their teachers. Current analyzers have been built to give feedback to experienced programmers who work on software projects or systems. The type of feedback and the type of analysis of these tools focusses on mistakes that are relevant within that context, and help with debugging software system. When teaching novice programmers this type of advice is often not particularly useful. It would be instead more useful to use these techniques to identify problem in the understanding of students of important programming concepts. This paper first explores in what respect static analyzers support the learning and teaching of programming, and what can be implemented based on existing static analysis technology. It presents an extension of static analyzer PMD to create feedback that is more valuable to novice programmers. To answer the question if these techniques are able to find conceptual mistakes that are characteristic for novice programmers make, we ran it over a number of student projects, and compared these results with publicly available mature software projects.