Innovative Active Methodologies That Promote Learning in Postgraduate Students in the 21st Century: Project-Based Learning and Flipped Classroom

Introduction

The appearance of the coronavirus has generated a series of social, economic, political and educational effects in individuals and countries that have fostered an environment of uncertainty that has gradually altered the dynamics of organizations. Given this context, it is important to train human talent capable of living in a world of uncertainty to promote the transformation of the rigid and centralized operating strategies of the institutions, which is why new methodological approaches are required for the development of competencies in postgraduate students that allow sustainable organizational development in the new normality (Chehaibar, 2020). Thus, the postgraduate program maintains in the 21st century the priority function of training high-level human capital oriented towards excellent performance in the organizations that work.

In this sense, the design and development of flexible, attractive, and dynamic training activities are recommended in order to promote communication and exchange of strategies through collaborative work that results in useful professional learning for students. Also, it should be noted that the implementation of active methodologies increases the perceived usefulness of the content, in addition to motivating and reducing the negative feelings generated by confinement (González et al., 2018). Thus, it is relevant to formulate strategies that make it possible to generate formative experiences from the digital resources and tools available to teachers that are effective in student learning (Molinero and Chávez 2019). In this way, active methodologies are the set of activities and strategies that teachers use to achieve greater student participation in the construction of their learning, highlighting Project-Based Learning, Gamification, and the Flipped Classroom (Roig-Vila & Álvarez, 2019).

In this sense, higher education, where the postgraduate level is located, it must be transformed to respond to this new context where learning enables the development of various capacities in the individual that allow them not only to solve the various problems of the real world but also the possibility of interacting collaboratively. The foregoing coincides with what was indicated by Sanz and López (2022) regarding the fact that the pandemic has promoted new opportunities to reflect on and potentiate academic training due to the fact that in countries a strategic factor that promotes economic development such as quality of life of citizens is education.

Therefore, during the forced transition from face-to-face to virtuality, educational actors learned and were trained by experience, so it is important to identify new ways of working to take advantage of the incorporated resources that allow a new teaching culture when the course is completed confinement (Lira & Uribe, 2022). Similarly, Dzandu et al. (2022); Guarino et al. (2022); Kang and Park (2022) establish that the continuous introduction of digital tools such as videoconferences, information management services in the cloud or knowledge management platforms have been highly accepted by both students and teachers.

Based on the above, it is required that the educational system in the post-COVID-19 era be oriented towards promoting the development of skills for life through a change in the ways of teaching and learning content based on methodologies that promote learning active, collaborative and by projects that are considered as tools for the acquisition, assimilation, and accommodation of new knowledge by the student body. Thus, the active methodologies considered in this chapter are the Flipped Classroom and Project-Based Learning.

The objective of the chapter is to propose the incorporation of active methodologies for the development of competencies of postgraduate students in order to promote quality professional training.