In this study, we investigated how well two different student-centred instructional models fostered engineering students' learning in a time of crisis. We analysed students' (N = 375) approaches to learning during four engineering mathematics courses in a Finnish university before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students' deep and surface…

The use of the graduate teaching assistant (GTA) to support the teaching activities of higher education institutions has been growing over the years and it is now a well-established practice. Conventionally training sessions, consisting usually of workshops, remain general and overemphasise policies, not providing sufficient preparation for…

This article presents how Problem- and Project-Based Learning (PBL) in engineering education can exploit the theoretical framework of the Space-Time (ST)-Continuum, according to which educational contexts can be classified in terms of the tightness vs. looseness of the relevant conceptual space S and available time T. By crossing these two…

Most of the contemporary critiques of university teaching are variants of a central argument that sets up a polarity between socalled 'traditional' teaching, often termed 'teacher-centred' and 'transmissive', and approaches that by contrast are considered 'student-centred', often also referred to with the phrase 'active learning'. This editorial…

Many traditional engineering schools are struggling to balance the calls to provide an innovative engineering education that meet the demands of graduates and their employers with the constraints and momentum of their existing curriculum. In this paper we present the conceptual design behind a framework that integrates existing discipline-specific…

The goal of this study is to explore the impact of a technology-integrated project-based learning intervention (ReaLabs) on students' learning attitudes, behaviours and self-regulated learning (SRL). A group of 49 mechanical engineering students was taught using this intervention and a group of 50 students in the same specialty was taught using…

Convincing teachers to implement pedagogical innovations is notoriously hard. This research project investigated the shift in pedagogical approach among a small group of faculty as they replaced traditional lecture-based methods with problem-based learning projects. Interviews were conducted with eight drivers of this change, around the question:…

The aim of this paper is to describe the design of chemical engineering laboratory sessions in order to focus them on the learning company approach. This is an activity carried out in the classroom similar to the activities that exist in real companies. This could lead classroom practice to a more cooperative learning and a different style of…

This paper reports numbers about the author's experience, spanning over 13 academic years, of teaching an introductory course about geographical databases to students of the Master degree in Information Engineering at L'Aquila University (Italy). The first eight editions of the course were delivered according to the teacher-centred approach, while…