Motivating ICT engineering students to take advantage of the humanities and social sciences. Experiences at UPM

Abstract

The students at the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Engineering Schools demonstrate a pronounced fragmentation of their attention spans, due to the hyper-connected nature of their lives, as well as the information overload they experience when they need to complete their tasks. At Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) an effort has been made to use a variety of methodologies to design the courses in the Humanities and Social Sciences which form a part of their core curriculum. As a result, educators have managed to better hold the students’ attention, encourage their participation, change the classroom dynamic, and facilitate an active and relevant learning process.
The methodologies used are agreed upon by a multidisciplinary team of professors. They include case studies, challenge-based learning in relation to students’ environment, Aronson’s cooperative work puzzle, readings from the press, debates, readings from the classics, viewing clips of documentary films, among others.
Some of the topics covered in these subjects are Sustainable Development Goals, technological revolutions, ethics and human rights, privacy, net neutrality, digital gender gap.