The present research compared the knowledge of primary school children and pre-service primary teachers about various native mammals of the Iberian Peninsula (IP-Portugal and Spain) and the African Savannah. For this purpose, a questionnaire was administered to 420 children and 215 pre-service teachers from these countries asking for the…

The integration of coursework in doctoral programmes is becoming increasingly common worldwide. In Portugal, too, coursework is now part of many doctorates and is usually assigned to the first year. This paper aims to understand if coursework is also an element of the relatively recent industrial doctorates in Portugal and, in this case, if it…

b-Mat@plicada is a b-learning Mathematics course for Higher Education students, mainly composed of educational videos available in the institutional Moodie platform. These contents were created by following a set of guidelines, where three components are considered: the quality of students' learning, the teacher's time and computer skills, as well…

In this paper we present a model for designing professional courses in a blended learning context as a tool to help the interaction between students, teachers and learning resources. This model aims to promote new concepts, new approaches and new strategies that have been changing the paradigm of teaching and learning. To develop a course based on…

We live in a fast-changing world, where breakthrough technological advances have not just disrupted industries but also changed the way we live, work and learn to a degree humankind has never experienced before. As the modern workplace becomes ever more global and interconnected, proficiency in foreign languages (FL) assumes a fundamental role in…

Contribution: An analysis of the extent to which sustainability is present in the syllabi, project briefs, report templates, and student final reports of the three Iberian European project semester (EPS) providers, over a five-year period. Background: EPS is a one-semester capstone project framework that adopts project-based learning and…

Product design and development (PDD) is a current topic of academic and industrial research. Emphasis on innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as design thinking and creativity has been recently pulled together into the teaching and research on PDD. This paper looks into a multidisciplinary setting made up of three similar but independent PDD…

This article intends to debate the institutional modes of first-year adjustment to higher education. Specifically, the aim is to analyze and consider the need to include social and academic integration activities in the curricular programs. The presented contributions are based on the investigations over the case study course that was studied…

Podcasts are digital files very popular in several and very distinct areas. In higher education, they have been explored in a multitude of ways mainly to support teaching and learning processes. The study here described focuses the integration of podcasts in Heredity and Evolution, a course from the Biology and Geology Degree Program at University…

Globalization is a trend that covers all society perspectives in general, and higher education in particular. The main traditional objective of higher education institutions has been to prepare domestic students with a given set of skills. Research competition and University's rankings, as well as the need to reach other publics, pushed them…

The Bologna Declaration has opened a stage of big and deep changes in the internal university organization, external cooperation, teaching models and methods, among other., all over the European countries. Here we will present and discuss a pilot experience conducted at the Engineering Department of the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro,…

The Product Design and Development (PDD) course is part of the graduate curriculum in the Engineering Design and Advanced Manufacturing (EDAM) study in the MIT-Portugal Program. The research participants included about 110 students from MIT, EDAM, and two universities in Portugal, Instituto Superior Técnico-Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (IST) and…

Investigates the model of the theory of instruction emphasized in the 1991 reform in Portugal at the level of science education, comparing it to the 1975 reform by analyzing the syllabi of the reform initiatives in Years 5/6 and 7 in order to discover possible changes in the teacher-student relation. (CMK)