Azael Fabregat wins the Catalan Government’s Jaume Vicens Vives Award for Teaching Innovation

 Azael Fabregat, professor in Chemical Engineering at the URV has won the Jaume Vicens Vives Award for Teaching Innovation for his course "Problem solving: the competition". The course forms part of the extracurricular subject “Problem solving strategies: elementary Dr. Watson, which he has taught for the last eight years.

It is a unique course within Catalan further education that is oriented towards identifying and solving problems and which fosters students’ abilities to make reasonable and reasoned decisions.

The professor’s work won him the URV’s Board of Trustees Individual Prize for Teaching Quality in 2009, after which the Board of Trustees put him forward for the Jaume Vicens Vives award. This year is the first time the individual award has been given to a professor from the URV. The URV’s Board of Trustees gave the group award to the study by the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences entitled: “Assessing transversal competences in the teaching of medicine”.

Azael Fabregat (Tortosa, 1953) is professor in Chemical Engineering  at the URV’s School of Chemical Engineering and is also head of the university’s Terres de l’Ebre campus. He wrote his doctoral thesis in Chemical Sciences at the University of Barcelona and is a member of the CREPI research group (Engineering of Chemical Reactions and the Intensification of Processes).

The professor explains in his report on his winning course that for a period condensed into 3 ECTS credits, the students receive basic training in how to correctly define real problems, thus avoiding misunderstandings and confusion and therefore wrong solutions; how to generate alternative solutions, in accordance with creative, imaginative and innovative criteria that are not always free from risk; and how to follow objective criteria and analyze the potential consequences of any action taken when deciding which solution should finally be implemented.

The course has had excellent results and has been positively received by the students. They have to develop abilities that allow them to adapt efficiently to an ever changing professional environment in an ever more globalized world where technical knowledge is no longer sufficient to ensure a lifelong professional career.

The Jaume Vicens Vives prizes were awarded on 18 September during the inauguration of the University of Catalonia’s academic year in Barcelona.