INTERESTING EXCHANGE OF EXPERIENCES AT THE BEGINNING OF THE III TRAINING OF TRAINERS “INTEGRATION OF THE R&D METHODOLOGY IN THE STUDY PLANS OF HEIs”

On the first day of Training INNOVA, teachers from the Universidad Portucalense de Portugal spoke about the inclusion of I+D methodologies in curricular design and about strategies to incorporate research in the classroom.

The day began with Dr. Jorge Marques, who spoke about the IES curricular development with a special focus on I+D methodologies. In this conference, he presented the process carried out at his university for curricular redesign, equivalence of credits and the integration of I+D in the curricular development at the undergraduate level; highlighting the need to begin to develop research skills in subjects of the first semester and to evaluate cross-disciplinary work on different subjects jointly between teachers of different subjects. Likewise, he highlighted the possibility for students to start their business practices from the second semester (real practice in the professional world), and to carry out multidisciplinary projects to develop entrepreneurial ideas.

From the discussion that arose with the participants, it should be noted how important quality control of IES is based on the definition of the governing guidelines and not on defining the contents of the subjects or the subjects of the courses from each university.

Subsequently, the adoption of active methodologies in the classroom context (emphasizing inquiry-based learning) was discussed. Dr. Helena Alburquerque contextualized the active methodologies and exemplified them with an interdisciplinary and interdepartmental project. The objective of this type of learning is for students to do things and think about what they are doing in order to obtain useful learning. Some other pedagogical tools that were mentioned were: the flipped classroom, design thinking, PBL Problem based learning and Project based learning and the SCRUM Methodology.

Finally, Dr. Makhabbat Ramazanova explained the steps that can be followed to develop an interdisciplinary research paper to foster students' research skills in the classroom context. She also focused on Research Based Learning as a teaching strategy that develops students' interest in research from the first year, that stimulates their ability to question and reflect on certain topics and that allows you to participate in research projects with the support of teachers.

We finished the day working on the development of an interdisciplinary research project per university in order to identify 2 to 3 careers, and different subjects to be able to carry out an interdisciplinary project with a climate change focus. For this, the teams from the different universities discussed a current issue/problem that responded to the objectives of the identified disciplines and saw how to create the team of teachers to rethink their role and define the type of groups of students with whom they would work. Each university worked and presented a project that could be carried out in their institutions to carry out this type of learning experience by articulating subjects from different careers. What was an interesting exercise that allowed to see new possibilities of interdisciplinary integration.