Because “practice makes perfect”, a group of Spanish and French students of Aerospace engineering with very promising results and a high level of acceptance has tested the Sky 4.0 Moodle course on analytical thinking.
The event took place on the 1st of October 2020 in the online format through a Teams session. The main objective of this national event was to present and test the Sky 4.0 Moodle course on analytical thinking.
The group invited to the Sky4.0 session consisted of students from the Master of Aerospace Engineering at the UPM and a reduced team of Erasmus students from the ETSIA (École Supérieure des Technologies Industrielles Avancées, Bidart, France). In total, the meeting counted with the participation of 37 students and 4 teachers.
During the meeting, the attendants were briefed on the project and its objectives and outcomes. A brief explanation was made on the relevance of soft skills for future workers in the aerospace industry, and on the soft skills that have been found more relevant by the project. Students were also briefed about the contents that have been developed for each one of the soft skills, and they were invited to experiment with the course on analytical thinking.
This course was settled locally into the Moodle server of the university so the student could access it like they usually would access their academic courses. They went through the course and tried to do each activity for two periods including individual work with the platform, and interactive workshop. After that, an open discussion of 30 minutes took place about the course to get feedback from the students.
The overall feedback about the course was excellent. Some minor improvements to the layout and corrections of errors were suggested. In general, the students found the duration of the course appropriate and considered the activities useful and interesting. Even though the participants were already familiarized with the idea of analytical thinking, the concepts tackled by the course and the approach of the course were new to them.
Moreover, the students found the course easy to follow, without any teacher support or guide, but consider that having the possibility to interact with a teacher and other students during the course will be useful. Students did find Moodle important for developing soft skills, incorporate soft skills in their lessons, and facilitate everyone to streamline their routine tasks. Finally, they pointed out that a key to success is to make user-friendly courses and activities.
