Tailoring Project-Based Learning for a communications engineering course

This paper describes the introduction of a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) methodology within an undergraduate course of Telecommunication Engineering at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). The PBL approach is in line with the convergence towards the common European Higher Education Area (EHEA), in which students will play a prominent and active role in their own learning. The selected course for this experience is related with the Design of Advanced Digital Receivers, a topic where real-life engineers have often to cope with ill structured, ambiguous and complex problems for which more than one correct answer may be possible. The results to be presented herein are based on the instructors' experience gained after two consecutive years of PBL practice on this course, and also on the feedback obtained from students.