The movement has lots of implications which are too complex to describe in a single post, but when it comes to my department, it means that there will be new courses adapted already to the Bologna Methodology starting during these days (September 2008). Planning and designing a course is quite a challenge no matter who you ask (see "How to Prepare New Courses without Losing Your Sanity" for a good reference), but it is even greater when the course includes on top of potentially different syllabus, different methodology (we are supposed to be embracing some sort of student centered learning), new teaching load, new schedule, etc.
All these turbulences are nothing compared with the huge delays inflicted in decissions such as which professors will coordinate which courses. In my department, the Bologna phase starts this coming February, because only the first year starts now and no course is taught in the fall semester.
To the point. I´ll be in charge of coordinating a course to be taught during the first semester of the second (sophomore) year in the track that leads to four different degrees on Telecommunication Engineering. The course is cleverly called "Arquitectura de Sistemas" (Systems Architecture) in a trick to fit pretty much whatever we want. The boundary conditions though are pretty interesting, namely:
- 6ECTS course.
- Meets twice a week for 90 minute sessions. One weekly session is with a so called large group (up to 120 students, but there will be way less than that), and the second with a small group of 40 students. There is also the possibility of meeting up to four times in a semester with the group of 20 students.
- Some sort of student centered methodology, or should I say Inductive Teaching is supposed to be used.
- Final exam value is capped to 60% of the final grade.
- Syllabus is about C programming and operating system concepts.
- Students arrive with two semesters of Java Programming only. No clue on any other programming language.
- C programming is required for several courses down stream (it´ll be difficult to tweak things regarding the core material).
- No other course in the degree is devoted solely to the study of operating system concepts.
- Start preparing the course with enough time to do it properly (I guess this post entitles me to tick this one.)
- Provide students with a truly genuine learning experience based on real-life motivating examples.
- Connect the course content with their future tasks as engineers.
- Follow the well documented guidelines on how to properly design an engineering course from the ground (and I mean "the ground", reading the white book of the degree) up.
- Make the course one of those students would remember as an Exapin ("Unforgettable Learning Experience" as defined by Miguel Valero in ¿Cómo nos ayuda el Tour de Francia en el diseño de programas docentes centrados en el aprendizaje?.
- Handle a team of teaching staff colleagues and massive amounts of learning material as effectively as possible.
- ... and of course, use technology to handle this workload and probably enhance the experience as a whole.
Next stop: "Checking the white books of the degrees" T - 12 Months and counting...
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