Student-Centered Teaching: an Experience at the Building Engineering School in Valencia, Spain

Abstract

During the 2nd semester of the academic year 2012-13, with the aim to improve the learning process, to develop competences and skills and to maximise the opportunities for interaction between students and lecturers, and among students themselves too, several active learning strategies have been set up in the course of "Energy efficiency in building", a specialisation course of 12 ECTS points with a interdisciplinary teaching staff. The pedagogical and didactical approach must face different external condition such as the duration of each lecture, the predictable drop of paying attention and the resulting necessity of different kind of activities. Several actions have been introduced in our lectures, as oral presentation of a self-chosen topic, intensive use of TICs, case studies, production of a poster, specific seminary on IR thermography, conference about energy classification, field trips, one minute papers. All this activities not only focus program-specific and professional competences, related to the academic discipline and a better knowledge and understanding of physical, thermodynamic laws or construction elements, but also want to train core and cross-cultural competences such as communication, management of information, teamwork, continuous learning, strategic thinking, cross-cultural behaviour, with a view to the final project presentation. The final results of the course showed the importance of the active learning actions in order to create a better learning and teaching environment and enhance the engagement of the students with the course. Despite the fixed seating and class size we could introduce many active learning activities in order to foster core competencies, learning and discussion. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.