one hand, the training requirements of students and
professionals have changed drastically, but, above all,
they are highly dynamic. For example, in the field
of engineering, especially those related to electronics,
telecommunications and computing, the rate of tech-
nological change is such that it is impossible to cover
it completely during a four-year training period (Kay-
nak and Sait, 2020).
In this same environment of uncertainty, univer-
sity teaching must change in order to adjust and an-
ticipate the needs of those who are not just students,
but extend to society as a whole and its institutions.
Teachers are committed to developing skills for in-
teraction and knowledge generation in a distributed
way, based on networking, and with local and global
collaborative groups; which, in turn, involves extend-
ing their skills to manage diversity; and, finally, the
capacity for constant learning and innovation (North
et al., 2018). Similarly, as teachers, we face, from
the educational point of view, generations of stu-
dents with characteristics not seen in previous peri-
ods (Moore et al., 2017) and that lead to teaching and
learning being rethought. We are facing students ac-
customed to immediacy in information and results;
with technology as an environment of natural interac-
tion, and without the ability to approach information
in depth (Beamish, 2016).
Thus, in recent years, there has been a great inter-
est in the academic community for a series of method-
ological strategies to enrich teaching processes in the
field of science and engineering to stimulate students’
deep learning (Graham, 2018; Finelli and Froyd,
2019). Within this background of research, based on
the recommendations made by the American Society
of Engineering Education, in conjunction with other
organizations, three critical areas are proposed that
should be addressed (Finelli and Froyd, 2019): (i) im-
prove student learning in undergraduate engineering
education, (ii) improve and diversify the paths of en-
gineering students to increase retention, and (iii) use
technology to improve learning, and participation and
commitment in engineering.
Our interest is mainly focused on generating con-
tributions in the first critical area. So, starting from the
question, who and what should we change in our work
to improve learning in undergraduate engineering ed-
ucation?, (Finelli and Froyd, 2019) propose four di-
rections for action: (i) change of organizational cul-
ture, (ii) research into effective evaluation practices,
(iii) promote the adoption of research-based teach-
ing practices, and (iv) characterize the development
of successful faculties. In this sense, these authors
show that in the literature there is a large set of re-
search (Umbach, 2007; Elrod and Kezar, 2017) that
relates the decisions and practices of instruction and
evaluation with aspects of the organization (depart-
ments, faculties, association of teachers): teachers
tend to generate a common practice. This aspect is
shown as an important point, and even a barrier to
overcome, when generating changes in higher educa-
tion. Thus, in accordance with this vision, this work,
in the first instance, seeks to analyze a new form of
organizational structure, the so-called ”teacher clois-
ter”, as a central axis in the deployment of strategies
for the promotion of students’ deep learning.
Regarding research on effective evaluation prac-
tices, several studies show the importance of for-
mative evaluation (Irons, 2007; McTighe and Wig-
gins, 2012; Qadir et al., 2020), feedback (Limniou
and Smith, 2014; McConlogue, 2020) and remedi-
ation (Karpicke, 2017) as strategies to improve stu-
dent learning. However, it is clear that the desired
learning outcomes need to be articulated so that they
are clearly known by students (Finelli and Froyd,
2019) and that, in addition, those outcomes to guide
the entire learning process (Biggs and Collis, 2014).
This step is fundamental and must be supported by
a wide range of professionals who define these out-
comes (Finelli and Froyd, 2019). In line with the
above, appropriate tasks and assessment tools should
be designed so that students can demonstrate the ex-
tent of the proposed outcomes. In this sense, our pro-
posal shares the criteria of (Biggs and Collis, 2014)
and (McTighe and Wiggins, 2012) regarding the cen-
trality of evaluation to improve the performance and
learning of students; but, we consider it transcendent
that, in addition to the evaluation criteria and instru-
ments, the instructional design must be based on a
structuring of knowledge, based on the threshold con-
cepts of each discipline and its relationships.
In this context, the organizational structure of the
university, in particular the organisation of teaching
staff, and instructional design for the training of fu-
ture professionals should be rethought to provide an
education that enables students to achieve deep learn-
ing and the skills needed to manage complexity and
uncertainty; while implementing a collaborative and
transdisciplinary teaching and learning process. That
is, the teaching process cannot be seen as an indi-
vidual activity of each teacher, disconnected from the
activity of the other teachers of the degree; but must
be assumed as a collective action. From our point of
view, an instructional design based on results-based
pedagogical actions (Biggs, 2011; Biggs and Collis,
2014) and on threshold concepts (Stern et al., 2017),
and supported by a teaching structure that stimulates
joint instructional design and collaborative teaching
can enhance deep learning (Biggs and Collis, 2014)
of university students.
This article is organized as follows. In Section II,
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