Professional development program to promote active learning in an engineering classroom

This work presents the structure and results of an ongoing engineering faculty development program at a large private university in Chile. This program uses the conceptual change approach as a framework in a recursive way, and it is specially designed to promote and ensure the use of active and innovative methodologies. The development program consists of six steps that aim to strengthen a learning community that fosters interaction of professors with common problems, interests, and experiences in a way that the collegial work sustains over time the dynamic and improved incorporation of active methodologies for teaching and learning. For this paper, we focus on the structure and some results. The results are related to faculty, students and institutional perceptions. We have evidence that faculty in this program changes their own perceptions as instructors towards reflecting whether their role is less regarding to transmitting knowledge, notes, and presentations to students. In the case of students, after a survey in courses in which participants were implementing educational strategies from the program, students’ view is positive towards the activities. Students indicated that they learned more and that those strategies should be used in other courses. Institutionally, the achievements of faculty in the program and the program itself received recognition by the university.