To make the teaching more effective and, therefore, to facilitate student comprehension, various Innovative Education (D.I., Didattica Innovativa) activities have been activated in several courses of the Degree and Master Degree in Electrical Engineering. Such D.I. actions are divided into two different types, Action 1 and Action 2. The Action 1activities are curricular, i.e. they appear in the Study Plan, provide credits, require a final evaluation, and may consist of:

• SOFT SKILL courses with a strong cross-sectional content (social skills, communication skills, self-control and self-esteem, team work, ethics, humanities, etc.);
• innovative teaching and learning approaches, such as BLENDED-LEARNING (flexible teaching, a part carried out in class and another turn online, to give immediate feedback to teachers and students) and FLIPPED-CLASS (the teacher indicates a topic to the student, who studies it at home, then back to the classroom student discuss it in small groups, together with the teacher), in order to make the student more responsible, facilitate collaboration between peers and improve the relationship with the teacher;
• JOINT ACTIVITIES with companies, research institutions, institutions;
• multimedia MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses, www.pok.polimi.it) that student watch and study in total autonomy, then they go back to the classroom to put into practice what they learned.

TheAction 2activities are extra-curricular, i.e. they do not provide credits, but are in any case traceable in the student’s career, since they appear in the “Diploma Supplement” (also known as “Transcript of Records”), delivered together with the Degree to the student. They are aimed at enhancing students’ interests and attitudes, their aggregation and friendly competition. The D.I. of Action 2 may consist of:

• KICK-STARTED WORKSHOPs on the “tools of the trade” (such as instrumentation, simulation and modelling CAD software, etc.), but also business games, meetings between young students and entrepreneurs, intellectual property and patentability issues, etc., which provide specific skills also for students coming from other course;
• PROJECTs to train students to put skills into practice;
• CONTESTs between students and together with companies.

As shown in the guidelines for the Degree and Master Degree in Electrical Engineering, several courses offer credits of D.I. Action 1; these are indicated in the tables with the symbol “d.i.” with the number of corresponding credits out of the total number of credits assigned to the course.

Furthermore, in the next academic years other forms of D.I., both in the form of Action 1 and Action 2 activities, will be activated, to allow students to acquire other “soft skills”, in addition to technological and scientific knowledge, aimed at improving both public speaking and interactive presentation of achieved results (e.g. the progress of on-going studies or projects), organizational skills, team building and effective teamwork interactions.