Bringing Active Learning into Engineering Curricula: Creating a Teaching Community

This paper presents the active learning teaching community created to assist the implementation stage of the CDIO-based curriculum reform currently underway at the School of Engineering of the Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción. The community is open to all engineering faculty, and at the moment includes members of the Computer Science, Industrial, Logistics and Civil Engineering programs. This teaching community promotes the use of active learning and information technologies in the classroom and provides instructors with a peer framework to support them while conceiving, designing, implementing and assessing innovations in teaching. It follows a peer-based model to aid the transfer of successful experiences across sequences of courses in a program and also across engineering programs. Among its main achievements, it has helped improve communication and strengthen collaboration among instructors of different areas, assisted in monitoring and evaluating the implementation of the curricular reform, inspired research in engineering education among its members, and contributed to the faculty development plan being implemented by the newly-created UCSC Teaching and Learning Center.

Proceedings of the 9th International CDIO Conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 9 – 13, 2013.