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This article presents and analyses a pedagogical experiment carried out at Polytech Marseille Engineering School (Aix-Marseille University). The key idea is to directly integrate cooperative pedagogy into the system as is, in order to tackle three challenges: 1) transform the problem of inhomogeneity of students into a strength through cooperation, 2) strengthen the capacity of students to share, understand, listen, communicate and hence, develop their faculty to work in a group, 3) develop their autonomy.

Actually, the co-authors of the paper belong to the group of students who were part of the experiment. The intention of the principal investigator (PI) is also to lead students to become actors of their own training.

For the present experiment, the PI integrated cooperative pedagogy into a “classical” four months L3 Algebra course. The approach was based on [Conway and al. 93] and [Grajczonek 2010], that is: on the one hand group work with peer evaluation has been used both to prepare tutorial classes and solve a weekly “challenge exercise”; on the other hand, a php/mysql application has been developed and released for individual weekly testing.

More precisely, the objective was to integrate cooperative work right into the ECTS system. Therefore, importing as such classical approaches of cooperative pedagogy was impossible; work had to comply with the program and schedule of the engineering school.

Groups of five to six students have been defined according to their curriculum in order to create groups of “similar inhomogeneity” (some of the students were hardly more than beginners in Algebra, other already had a Licence 2 in Mathematics). Group work was structured with four roles (secretary, moderator, facilitator, redactor – attributed weekly) and weekly evaluation was done through the group challenge exercise, the secretary report and peer evaluation of students (using the WebPA application developed by Loughborough University, UK).

Also in order to evaluate students weekly on an individual basis, the PI developed some years ago a random test generation application (php/mysql). This application has been extended and released as a freeware by the co-authors.

Similarly, co-author students have conducted the evaluation of the approach presented in this paper.