"The Active Project-Based Learning" for Electrical and Information Engineering Teaching

This paper deals with the description of a newly practiced method of teaching in EI. CESI, a French engineering school. This method called "The Active Project-Based Learning" (APBL) belongs to an emergent trend of innovative and active learning methods. The APBL approach has as a goal to eliminate the drawbacks of the classical education methods, which are often based on an almost unidirectional teacher speech, an unbalance in the amounts of information exchange and interaction between the transmitter (the teacher) and the receiver (the learner). Moreover, clearly, the great quantity of knowledge flow, the inactivity of the learner, a certain monotony of the teacher speech and finally the abstract character of some scientific fields are critical factors of risk and failure of the conventional method. This is more and more true face to a new generation growing in a digital environment where media and digital tools are preponderant. Consequently, the "old" conventional method has reached its limitation. In opposition to the conventional method, the APBL puts the student in the center of the learning mechanism. The learning is based rather on a flexible and dynamic interaction between the teacher and the student. he teacher ensures a role of coaching and accompanying the learner to reach the preplanned pedagogical goal with an easier and a faster way on a hand and with a greater chance of success on the other hand. The student can trust more and more in his capacities and can manage better, organize and customize his own learning process. Organizing studies by project will increase the student autonomy and will set up a similar context of professional work of an engineer in a company. Finally, elementary steps of the project are defined to ensure a continual improvement process, by following the PDCA process (P-Plan, D-Do, Check, A-Act), a widely used management method in industry. These are the great outlines of the APBL method, its expected results and impacts on the quality and efficiency of learning.