Tools and strategies for improving PBL laboratory courses with a high student-to-faculty ratio

Project-based learning (PBL) is one of the most interesting instructional strategies in the field of technical and signal processing systems. However it is especially complex and difficult to implement when applied to laboratory courses with a high student-to-faculty ratio. In this paper, we describe our six-year experience of teaching laboratory courses in electronics in the telecommunication engineering studies (a career that is a mixture of computer science and electronics engineering) after the adoption of the PBL philosophy, and the design and implementation of several strategies and tools to ease the administrative, teaching and learning tasks in these laboratories. Finally, we offer some evaluation results, showing that the adoption and combination of all our strategies and software tools actually works. Both the laboratory acceptance of the students (3.7 on a 1-5 scale) and students performance are high (they get 78.3% of the maximum grade, on average)