OPTIMIZING STUDENT LEARNING THROUGH THE COORDINATION OF DIFFERENT SUBJECT ACTIVITIES: AN APPROACH BASED ON TUTORIAL ELABORATION

One of the great challenges of university teaching is to encourage students to integrate and make use of the knowledge acquired in a particular course within the framework of another; that is, to be able to consolidate and apply obtained knowledge beyond the scope of the subject where it was studied, thus optimizing the learning process. In this scope, we have developed an innovative project with the main aim of promoting the application of knowledge acquired in a subject taught in the first semester into another one developed in the following semester. More particularly, it was intended that students enrolled in the Information Systems Degree at the University of Cádiz would apply the knowledge acquired in the IP (Internet Programming) course (third year, first semester) in the Information Systems Engineering (ISE) course (third year, second semester). To achieve this goal, it was proposed that ISE students would carry out supervised activities focused on the use of what they had previously learned in the IP course. As part of their IP course students would have done a series of tutorials to facilitate their use in ISE. It was also taken into account that students could attend both ISE and IP optionally: to enrich the experience, a support mechanism from students who had previously followed IP lessons to those who had not, was also implemented. The results were quite positive; IP students reinforced their acquired knowledge when elaborating the tutorials; ISE students were highly motivated by the methodology, they found tutorial contents of high quality and usefulness, and the acquisition of the corresponding knowledge was demonstrated.