Process Competences in PBL: Qualitative Assessment of an Experience

Constraining calendars and highly specialised curricular requirements make most teachers on engineering and related technical education focus mainly on fulfilling the technical requirements and objectives described in the curricula for their courses. Other fundamental aspects of the daily work of an engineer, in our current globalised and heterogeneous reality, are therefore not properly considered, when not completely disregarded, when designing course and curricular objectives. From this perspective, more professional skills like group formation, analysis and characterisation, group work methodologies, meetings, communication and discussions, coordination, delegation, analysis and self-critic of the group performance are not usually tackled. The result is a disadvantage for newly graduated students, when they have to enter in a highly competitive job market, where efficiency and quality of their output are the main reference elements for their evaluation.

This article presents an experience in which some of these elements have been introduced in an existing course, tailored as a Problem Base Learning (PBL) course in Advanced Telecommunication at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). The results have been evaluated and assessed by the students, in the light of their own personal experiences and evolution during the course.