Facilitating the adoption and dissemination of active and cooperative learning methodologies in engineering education using a learner activity index approach

The overall aims of the project are centred on the adoption and dissemination in engineering education at institutional and inter-institutional level in Portugal of good practice with regard to Active and Cooperative Learning (ACL). We aim to achieve this over a three-year project lifetime through a two-phase strategy: i) Initial implementation of ACL techniques in formal teaching contexts at departmental level in two engineering colleges through the use of self and peer observation using a semi-quantitative tool to measure a Learner Activity Index; ii) Subsequent dissemination of the approach to other departments and colleges using online Community of Practice (CoP) cultivation strategies and Web 2.0 tools.