On 16 March 2020, as a result of the unprecedented global health crisis linked to the emergence of a new form of coronavirus (COVID-19), the 74 universities of France closed their doors, forcing nearly 1.6 million students, as well as their teachers, to find solutions and initiatives that could ensure continuity in teaching. In the reliance on videoconferencing tools, chat, the sharing of documents/tutorials/videos/podcasts, and the use of social networks, many ideas have emerged, but no consensus has developed nor has a common way of doing things been adopted by a majority of teachers. Some software tools, such as Zoom, have also been questioned over data security issues or excessive intrusion into the student learning process. Nevertheless, in these uncertain times, much had to be done so that students can acquire the requisite knowledge, develop skills, and build on what they have learned. How can we ensure that the learning process is as smooth as possible for everyone involved? How can we evaluate knowledge and skills learned at a distance, and their relevance? Four groups of electronic and electrical engineering students in France were monitored during the containment period in order to provide answers to these questions. Lectures, tutorials, practical work, and projects were carried out using the Microsoft Teams and Zoom video conferencing and chat tools to complement activities made available through the digital work environment. In order to ensure equity among all students, especially in view of the digital divide, open access tools/software/applications have been promoted. In the various surveys completed, the engineering students asserted their complete satisfaction with the learning process, the use of distance tools, and the level of mastery of these tools by their teachers. The results of the various knowledge tests show that, for the same course, distance learning does not reduce the performance of the engineering students. Indeed, they obtained local grades similar to those expected in face-to-face teaching. The results presented in this article are not intended to highlight the virtues of distance education, but rather to open up a debate and reflect more widely on the sustainability of this transformation of education in universities.

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The transformation of teaching practices in universities remains necessary to better motivate, involve and promote the success of increasingly "connected" students. These new practices can be off-putting to teachers because of the complexity of their implementation. New practices, such as those in the in-verted/flipped classroom model, which consists of reversing the nature of in-classroom and out-of-class activities, are well documented in the pedagogical literature; however, few empirical studies are available that allow us to objec-tively analyze their effect on student learning. As such, university teachers are not being encouraged to change their traditional pedagogical practices. This manuscript proposes a rather simple method, which draws on but is not directly equivalent to the inverted classroom model. The aim here is to re-verse the traditional pedagogical sequence of “Lectures; Tutorials; then Prac-tical work”. This mode of teaching is still very popular in the university sys-tem, particularly in France. More precisely, in the proposed model, teaching begins with practical work, followed by tutorials and finishing with lectures that offer time for questions and debates. This method places much more importance on collaborative working and the consolidation of students’ knowledge and skills. An online course platform called Celene has been widely used to support student learning and to maximize teacher-learner in-teractions. The proposed approach was tested with students of an electrical engineering course in their final year of engineering school. A full six-year feedback period is discussed to demonstrate the interactivity and effective-ness of the approach. The results of the various experiments carried out show that this method “smooths” out some of the difference in student competence. In particular, it is a powerful remediation approach to restore energy to students, who sometimes feel overwhelmed by the traditional ap-proach, which is very transmissive. As a result, the proposed method signifi-cantly reduces failure rates.

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RésuméCet article propose un retour d'expériences d'une nouvelle approche pédagogique de l'enseignement de l'électronique et du génie électrique menée au sein de Polytech Tours (école d'ingénieurs). Cette approche est fondée sur un projet intensif (trois semaines consécutives à plein temps dédiées à l'étude et à la réalisation d'un système industriel) réalisée de manière collective (33 élèves ingénieurs répartis en 3 groupes de 11 étudiants).L'étude a consisté à procéder à l'électrification d'un châssis de kart et à rendre le véhicule électrique performant.Les élèves ingénieurs ont entre autre justifié tous les éléments composant le système de motorisation, assemblé toutes les pièces du kart électrique, testé le bon fonctionnement de ce dernier et apporté une innovation technologique autour de la récupération d'énergie cinétique au freinage par l'intermédiaire de supercondensateurs. Cette initiative, fortement appréciée des étudiants puisque chacun d'entre eux a joué un rôle actif dans la réalisation du projet, a en outre été saluée par la presse locale et régionale. Mots-clésInnovation pédagogique, projet collectif intensif, kart électrique. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Article publié par EDP Sciences et disponible sur le site http://www.j3ea.org ou http://dx

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Authors introduce two different pedagogical applications concerning electrical go-karts "e-Kart" of the IUT GEII (Institut Universitaire de Technologie, Génie Électrique et Informatique Industrielle) of Tours. Since 2003, this project didn't stop growing with, in 2007, a first challenge with asynchronous low-voltage motor go-karts too. Two main projects are here introduced: the first concerns acquisition of physical data aboard go-karts and their transmission to a personal computer; the second one is about the field-oriented control (FOC) of an asynchronous 28 V motor.