REDUCING ABSENTEEISM IN THE CLASSROOM: TWO CASE EXAMPLES

One of the most challenging situations in nowadays education at all levels is attracting and retaining the attention and motivation of the students. This situation has been deeply aggravated by the COVID situation, where the possibility of on-line lessons has led to new typologies of remote approaches. In this work, developed at the Barcelona School of Telecommunications Engineering (ETSETB) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), we describe the use of different methodologies to increase the student’s attendance to the classes. We evaluate two different case scenarios. Case 1 is the change of teaching strategy in the Sustainability & Ethics (S&E) seminars in project-based courses of bachelor’s degrees. And Case 2, is a core subject master’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering. Case 1 scenario consists of introducing S&E competences in a bachelor-level Product Development Project course where students work in teams. These competences are taught through master-class-style led seminars. The seminars show a high absenteeism level, as most of the teams decided to send just one representative of the team to attend to them. The solution proposed to Case 1 scenario consists on reducing the master-class exposition time and substituting it by a hands-on workshop on how to develop the S&E report on the specific project topic of each team. This has increased the attendance to class, from 20% to 85% approximately in this track. The motivation has been also noticeably increased. Case 2 scenario analyses the subject Electronics Instrumentation and Optoelectronics (EIO). The subject has 80% contents of theoretical knowledge. The attendance to the theory lessons during the last few years was very low, especially after the COVID situation, roughly estimated to be a 35%, and the evaluation results showed that the final exam scores had decreased dramatically. With this starting point, the theory lessons have been changed by reducing the master-class part, including short individual open-book exams during the lessons and a final challenge-based (CB) activity related to the theory contents. The class attendance has increased from 35% to 95% and the motivation of the students attending to the class has been noticeably increased as well.