An Active Learning Approach to Teaching a Graduate Course on the History of Telecommunications

Resumen

A first-year graduate course on the History of Telecommunications was formally incorporated into the School of Telecommunications Engineering at Technical University of Madrid in the year 2005. This course is intended for students who have completed an undergraduate degree in engineering, no matter if they are actually electrical engineers or not. It comprises a number of study-units amounting to 3 ECTS (European Credit Transfer System), oriented with an active learning approach in order to mainly prepare students to think for themselves after the course is over. The first objective of the course was to make the subject easy to follow for all the students, even for non-electrical engineers. As a second objective, it was considered to use a teaching methodology based on non-traditional methods, such as blended learning, encouraging students to follow the lessons by their own. And as a final objective, it is expected students to have a proactive attitude towards the study of this discipline, challenge them with an active learning point of view.