DEVELOPING STUDENTS' ABILITIES BY INTEGRATING MEDIA AND SIMULATORS IN COURSES WITH HIGH-DEMANDING TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE

The digital age and the globalization culture are accelerating how the society evolves, direct consequences of this fast-evolving model can be found in labour markets requirements. Traditionally the University is to be tightly related with the society needs. So it is on the University to form students not only giving them the needed knowledge for their profiles but also enhancing their abilities to cope with the society model they will face. This is of special importance if we consider that certain knowledge has a sell-by date.

The European Higher Education System (EHES) considers a new educational model where the University education is binded to the professional fields through the ECTS credit system where the learning is based on competences (personal and professional). These competences to be developed by the University are on the academic and professional profiles chosen.

Competences, as defined by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) are the abilities to attend complex demands and accomplish several different tasks successfully. A competence is a combination of practical abilities, knowledge, motivation, ethic valour, attitudes, emotions and other social behaviours that are used together to accomplish a certain task.

At University of Almeria, an integration analysis was made and a set of generic competences were selected from different documents created for the convergence towards the new educational framework. From this initial set and according to Dublin descriptors, a group of ten competences were selected. This group forms the basic formative identity of our University. One of the competences selected is abilities to deal with ICT. This competence was underlined by several groups of experts (CRUE-TIC and REBIUN) as a must for every grade student. This competence proposes three hot spots (which are related to the European Computer Driving License):

1. Computer and devices: elemental understanding of a computer and its parts. Understand how it works and how to configure devices.
2. Software: knowledge to install and configure.
3. Network: browsing, resource location.

Our experience is on how to develop abilities in our students according to the first point. At technical careers many foundational concepts are exposed during the first two courses (freshmen and sophomore students). The importance of the concepts themselves is doubtlessly high but so important is the relationships between them. These relationships should be used, later on, for building cognitive networks useful to cope with more advanced concepts on higher courses (and helpful to discover further relationships). Helping these students to discover such relationships and exploit the concepts is the issue followed with our work. One of the main ambitions was to avoid self-contained subjects.

Following the advices given by Patricia Greenfield, a UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children’s Digital Media Center, L.A.: “a greater focus on visual media exacts a toll” we have put extreme care in integrating media with contents to favour critical thinking. We have developed multimedia material and simulators for two courses: Computer Organization (first year) and Advanced Device Programming (second year). Results obtained encourage us to work further this way.