PBL Methodology as a University Educational Tool to Create Sustainable Cities

Metodología ABP como Herramienta Educativa Universitaria para Crear Ciudades Sustentables

Abstract

Today's society demands coherent professionals who are sensitive to the main problems that cities present. In this sense, universities must link the student's educational process with their environment through an active, integrated and constructive learning process, for which it is necessary to break the paradigms of traditional teaching. The Metropolitan University, through the execution of Community Service projects, has empowered students to learn by doing, using the Problem-Based Learning or PBL methodology. The study presented aims to design proposals to improve the quality of life in favor of the creation of sustainable cities, detecting the main problems in certain communities and generating different technical and economically feasible solution alternatives. This is how the students, divided into multidisciplinary teams, managed to replicate their knowledge to the communities and carried out projects with proposals for social and technical improvements (engineering type) that were delivered to the communities and the corresponding authorities (Mayors and municipalities) for their execution. All this hand in hand, not only with the guide teachers, who facilitated the use of the student-centered learning method, which constituted a paradigm shift; but from urban actors who, such as the communities impacted by the projects or the Non-Governmental Organizations that accompanied the process, provided the opportunity to structurally strengthen the relationship between university and city, which pointed towards the achievement of objective 11 of Sustainable Development on Cities. and Sustainable Communities.