The changing European learning environment

The New Bologna Environment pushes us to engaging new ways of teaching. Promoting the participation and commitment of students in their learning process is a key factor for the XXI Century University. Active methodologies should be used to accomplish that. In other words, the key for active learning is to proposing activities that make the students work on their own, looking for the achievement of high objectives.
A key factor for the successful application of active methodologies is that students receive as much feedback from the lecturer as possible; that way students can modify and improve their learning process continuously. As a result, these methodologies are highly time–consuming for lecturers and face an important resistance to change within Academia.

But technology can help us to organize the work and the communication with students. Tools that make the mechanical work associated with the management of students, their papers and their continuous evaluation, improve the efficiency of the time spent by lecturers.

Some e-learning platforms are very useful to the management of the communication with students. For example, lecturers can see statistics of the participation of a particular student in a forum, or listing the mails sent from a student and the responses given to him. But there are other tasks that are not implemented in any software yet.

Developing tools that simplify the hard mechanical work associated to the application of a certain methodology, is key to success in the Bologna process if class groups are not being reduced.

In addition, next generation e-books are being defined at present. As methodology, contents (e-books, technical notes…) have to be flexible enough in order to get our goal. Each student has his own personal resources so the contents have to be that flexible in the sequencing. Two different students may sequence contents differently.

Lecturers will have the possibility to interact within the material to orient each student in a specific direction. In this way, learning is an active process that may change as a function of the different actors that can play a role on it. Contents within text books cannot be static but count on different types of contents. (technical notes, workgroups or deliverables). And the learning strategy applied in each case should be oriented to develop in the students certain specific skills. These specific skills will vary depending on the degree the students are in.

New evaluation strategies: Classmate Peer Evaluation

The New Bologna Environment pushes us to engaging new ways of teaching. Promoting the participation and commitment of students in their learning process is a key factor for the XXI Century University. Active methodologies should be used to accomplish that.

We would like to analyze in this blog different active learning methodologies that can be applied to engineering education, and also how technology may help apply such methodologies easily.

The key for active learning is to proposing activities that make the students work on their own, looking for the accomplishment of high objectives.

A key factor for the successful application of active methdologies is that students receive as much feedback from the professor as possible; that way students can modify and improve their learning process continuously.

To provide this feedback several actions may be taken, which can be classified in two main groups:

1. Actions based on discussions. Discussions generated about a subject, project or problem (and activities that promote them, both in the classroom or on-line), help the students work out their own knowledge based on the information received, and also on their previous experience.

2. Actions based on evaluation. Both self-evaluation and classmate-peer evaluation are a straight way to improve the personal capability of the students to review their own personal work and to think about a better way to accomplish the objectives established by the professor.

To begin with, we will focus on the second group (classmate-peer evaluation). Classmate-peer evaluation allows tracking the performance of the student on a continuous basis. In addition, students learn how to evaluate and the final result is a better capacity of self-evaluation.

Classmate-peer evaluation is usually limited to a small group of students. For instance, the students are divided in groups of four, and are asked to make a collaborative work (e.g. report on a subject, laboratory practical work...). Each one of the members of the group evaluates the other three. Notice that, at first, the evaluations may not be accurate. For that reason, the professor should find a non time-consuming way to check them.

The way to do this is to provide the students with the guide for evaluating the work of their peers in the group. That guide should be given at the beginning of the semester. The guide should focus on the aspects the professor considers the most important.

Furthermore, the effectiveness of peer evaluation depends strongly on ensuring proper feedback on a timely basis. Professors should provide this feedback accurately and properly but, as the number of student increases, this timely feedback becomes more and more cumbersome.

In order to cope with that difficulty, information technologies tools can provide some help. We propose the following key functionalities for such a classmate-peer evaluation tool.


1. Students fill an electronic form with the evaluation of their peers.

2. All the evaluations are saved in a database and are identified both with the name of the student being reviewed and with the name of the reviewer.

3. The tool should compare the evaluations from all the students involved (usually three) in order to validate the goodness of the evaluation itself. If an evaluation is quite different from the others, the tool raises an alarm to the professor, who should review it.

4. The professor reviews the evaluations and marks them as valid or invalid. The system will merge professor’s evaluation with the valid ones.

In this way, peer evaluation is much more effective and less time-consuming, so professors could spend more time giving feedback to their students than evaluating them... which is more profitable.