Abstract:

Following the implementation of a teaching protocol according to the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) corresponding to a specific subject, in the degree of Industrial Engineering at the University of the Basque Country in Spain, recently presented at ICERI 2008, the next stage has been focused on a deep analysis of some of the outcomes, in terms of teaching experiences reached after this procedure was first implemented several years ago.
The main objective is the discussion, both in a personal and a collective way, about the proper higher educational practice itself in order to improve the management of the curriculum for the new educational challenges, basically in the way of: “Learning anywhere, anytime”. It is well known that, the number of Educational Institutions running nowadays implementation processes according to the so called “Bologna accords” has been increasing in a substantial way all over the European countries for the past years. Its main purpose is to create the European higher educational area by achieving academic degree and quality assurance standards much more comparable and compatible throughout Europe.
Nevetheless, not always this objective has been reached as one of the most relevant problems arise from the number of students in each group, as for big groups this system becomes clearly unfeasible as it results exhausting for the lecturer due to the enormous amount of tasks to be handled, such are mainly the way to evaluate the achievement of the different competentes associated to any particular subject. Additional negative aspects pointed out int his study was the lack of criteria for the standardization of the syllabus contents for the same subject, getting in this way further away from the matters provided in the same area of knowledge for different high teaching institutions.
Finally the practical results directly obtained from this experience will be carefully analysed and discussed here, leading to a better and a more comprehensive understanding of the contents initially proposed in the theoretical background, so the student could extract the pertinent conclusions about the way that the ECTS learning context affects his learning process.



References:
[1] Bourne, J., Harris, D. and Mayadas, F., Engineering education: Learning anywhere, anytime, Journal on Engineering. Education, Vol. 94, N. 1, pp. 131 - 146, 2005.
[2] A. Heinze and C. Procter, Online Communication and Information Technology Education Journal of Information Technology Education, Vol. 5, pp. 236 - 249, 2006.
[3] J. Blanco; F. Mendía; L. Martín and F. Peña, Implementing new experiences in ECTS for higher education procedures at the University of the Basque Country according to the Bologna declaration, ICERI 2008, Nov. 2008, Madrid, Spain.
[4] A. Perez, R. Herradon, Work in progress: an undergraduate B-Learning Experience for the teaching o Politics of Telecommunications and Information Society, 38 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference. Saratoga, NY. October 2008.

Keywords:

higher education, curriculum management, ects implementation procedures.