Information technologies in higher education: Lessons learned in industrial engineering

This article describes a teaching experience in which information and communication technologies were applied in five industrial engineering courses at the Universidad de Tarapaca in Chile. The paper compares the performance and course pass rates of the e-learning platform and portable pocket PC platform with those of the same courses teaching in traditional classroom methods. Two of the courses involving 62 students used an elearning platform and its associated pedagogical model, while the other three, covering 110 students, employed a portable Pocket PC platform and a collaborative pedagogical model. The results show that there is no statistical evidence that technology rise the students marks, but did reveal significant improvements in course pass rates.