Abstract:

Several and deep changes in the university environment are taking place through the construction of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the involved process of design, evaluation and implementation of new curricula. The degrees map reconfiguration, a new credit accounting system focused on student workload (ECTS, European Credit Transfer System) and skills learning methodologies, are three central issues of this new educational paradigm.

In fact, Spanish universities have been very careful in defining those competencies that students must achieve within the new degrees and postgraduate courses. However, they have not paid attention to the way of measure them. Student skills in many cases cannot be evaluated by the traditional assessment methods used in education today (Makatsoris, 2009). After analysing several degrees curricula it can be observed that there is an important gap regarding how competencies are measured and where should be reflected (Mano and Moro, 2009).Therefore, the assessment process is somewhat neglected in the Spanish Higher Education.

In that sense, the present work addresses this issue by exploring the implementation of an assessing competence tool. Specifically, we analyze the status and evolution of soft skills of the Official Master's Program students on Creating and Managing Innovative Technology-Based Companies held at the University of Barcelona. Thus, we aim to assess students' soft skills using a system called Evolute developed by the Tampere University of Technology (Finland) (Kantola 2005; Vanharanta, 2005a).

Evolute is a digital platform based on information and communication technologies (ICT), which has been created for self-assessing personal and social skills using different profiles. In this case, we chose "TRICUSPOID - Entrepreneurs' competition” profile, because it perfectly fits the objectives of the Master's curriculum. This tool evaluates students’ entrepreneurs’ skills in an indirect way, through different statements relating to their daily life activities. Also, it demands to individuals the current level of their behaviour with reference to the level they would like to manage in the future. With this information the system generates immediately a personal and individualized report of thirty-three soft skills considering the bias.

In fact, with this paper we want to show the experience achieved implementing this tool and its validity and usefulness to assess soft skills in other university studies. The results show that the methodology Evolute constitutes an appropriate tool of collection and data analysis, which helps the actors of Higher Education to analyze and evaluate students’ skills acquisition.

References:

Makatsoris, C. (2009): “An Information and Communication Technologies–Based Framework for Enhancing Project Management Education through Competence Assessment and Development”. Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing. 19(6): 544–567

Mano-González, M., & Moro-Cabero, M. (2009): “La evaluación por competencias: propuesta de un sistema de medida para el grado en Información y Documentación”. Textos universitarios de biblioteconomía y documentación. N. 23. 12th October 2010: http://www.ub.edu/bid/23/delamano1.htm

Kantola, J. (2005): Ingenious management. Doctoral thesis, Tampere University of Technology at Pori, Finland.

Vanharanta, H. (2005b): Plenary at HCI International Conference 2005, Las Vegas, Nevada, July 22–27.

Keywords:

Competence evaluation, EHEA, soft skills.