ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING LIFE LONG LEARNING PLAN



Electrical Engineering Life Long Learning Plan

Electrical Engineering Life Long Learning Plan

Introduction

The Higher Education is now involved in a real educational reform, in which active learning is the central axis. New policy and strategies are proposed and new methods of the teaching-learning-evaluation process are taken into account, both for teachers and students, in order to save time and to make the process efficient. New Challenges in Engineering Education also appeared. In the paper I will provide my own Electrical Engineering Life Long Learning Plan for my students. Also I will do a comparison between the traditional and interactive learning method related to Electrical Engineering.

Electrical Engineering Life Long Learning Plan

In comparison with the situation of a traditional learning in which the teachers expose or read the lectures as emitters and students are passive parts as receivers, without any feedback, the active learning takes into account the students and their learning needs, as the core of the system. The synergetic effects are produced if the students are the active partner of the process: they use the learning resources through reading, writing, talking, listening; they reflect on phenomena and processes, they can ask questions, evaluate the results, consolidate the new knowledge and apply the information to the special field (Woods et al, 1975, pp 238-243).

Interactive Methods In Teaching

In comparison with the situation of a traditional learning in which the teachers expose or read the lectures as emitters and students are passive parts as receivers, without any feedback, the active learning takes into account the students and their learning needs, as the core of the system. The synergetic effects are produced if the students are the active partner of the process: they use the learning resources through reading, writing, talking, listening; they reflect on phenomena and processes, they can ask questions, evaluate the results, consolidate the new knowledge and apply the information to the special field (Farrow, and G. Norman, 2003, pp. 1131-1132).

In active learning many strategies which I will proposed and would like to implement in my teaching sector for example individual activities, peer activities, informal working groups, cooperative-formal working groups, etc. My role as a teacher is essential in establishing the type of strategy depending on the number of students, environment, spatial location, objectives of syllabi/curricula, and the criterion of time. Some strategies recommend that lectures should not be abandoned- the traditional and active methods could be combined, adding new values to the evaluation process of teaching and learning. A comparison between the classical and modern methods clarifies the specific characteristics (see Table 1, Table 2).

Table 1: Comparison between traditional and active learning

The interactive methods are oriented on new centres if interest, such as: group discussions, problembased learning, case studies, role interpreting, structured study groups, etc. It is foreseen that computer and video-techniques would represent more attractive teaching methods (Midwinter, 1997, pp. 66 -70).

Table 2: Comparative characteristics for the traditional and for the interactive methods of ...