Traditionally, in the Information Systems School at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, students in network engineering courses have reported a disconnection between contents in the bachelor’s degree programs and the practical abilities required by companies. At some point, this is a normal situation, as University programs are focused on general competencies, while companies tend to look for experience with some particular popular technologies (which may evolve or disappear). However, even when this difference can make sense from the academic perspective, it has negative impacts on learning: students tend to feel non-motivated to work with competences they feel they are useless for their future employment.

In order to investigate how this problem can be addressed, a pilot experience was developed at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid during the academic year 2024-25. The proposed experience was focused on two different degrees: Information Technologies and Computer Engineering. The mandatory evaluation activities within the “Advanced Networks” course were transformed into a real engineering project, proposed by consulting companies in the sector. Two companies participated as external stakeholders in this experience, while nearly 50 students were part of this pilot experience, aware of the new evaluation process.
Students were organized into groups of four to six people. Each group was provided with a Virtual Machine with a clean installation of Ubuntu Server and internet connection. Consulting companies provided a project based on the implementation of a Service-Oriented or Content-Oriented network. The project was divided into four different practices. The first three with 20% weight. The last one had a weight of 40%. Students could work freely and independently, while professors answered all the questions and facilitated all required materials. For each practice, students should submit a document in PDF format through the institutional Learning Management System (Moodle).

The four students with the best performance could access a paid formative period in the consulting companies that proposed the project. The final evaluation was based on rubrics and real experiments with the network infrastructure developed by each group. Students could test their developments with the same equipment later used by professors for evaluation purposes at any time and as many times as they desired. Laboratories were open, so students could also continue their experiments and developments after the teaching schedule.

Information from the official surveys and the academic results was collected, and compared to results from previous years, when the subject was organized according to a traditional scheme. The Mann Whitney U statistical test was employed to conclude if differences are significant or not.
Results confirmed a significant improvement in the students’ motivation, their satisfaction and a slightly but still significant improvement in their academic performance.

Keywords: Engineering education, pilot experiences, industry-university cooperation, motivation, learning by doing, network engineering.