Abstract:

European Higher Education Area requirements have favored a new idea of teaching and learning processes. One of the core aspects in this renewal process has been an educational approach based on competences.

Helping students to learn as effective and efficiently as possible is challenging for those university lecturers who try to find better new ways to present content while maintaining rigor. From this, we find the necessity to apply new methodologies in the university education context.With this purpose, there are numerous studies that show a positive relation on how students find interesting or fun the materials they work with in the classroom and what they remember and learn from those materials. Therefore, the fun could be considered a central axis of the learning process.

This study presents an innovation of teaching that aims to demonstrate that the fun plays a very important role in education. In particular, this paper deals with the task of assessing how the fun perception influences the learning perception of the student, as well as the power of the fun as a method for achieving core competencies in the current educational context. Finally, it focuses on the role of the fun perception in the willingness of the student to return to participate in this type of innovations.

To achieve this challenge, an innovative teaching experience was designed based on the use of new technologies throughout the teaching-learning process. It proposes the use of didactic images created by the students using photographs as material to carry out the different practical activities.

The innovation was applied to 141 students of the double degree in business management and law of the University of Granada. The participants valued the experience through a questionnaire done the last day of class activities. The learning perception obtained was measured in comparison with the learning perception obtained with traditional practices. Also their opinions on the fun of the activity and on the fun of the traditional practices were compared. The students were given also an attitude scales about the innovation as well as an attitude scales about the intention to return to participate in the innovation. Univariate analysis (descriptive statistics) and bivariate analysis (parametric and non-parametric) were applied to demonstrate the role of the fun in university teaching.

The results show that innovation in teaching is generally considered to be fun. The group that thinks to have enjoyed more with the innovation than the traditional practices reported a greater perception of obtained learning, a better attitude and a stronger intention of wanting to return to participate in this type of innovations.

At the same time, such fun leads to the creation of a proper atmosphere in the classroom in order to achieve professional and personal competences which are essential in the current education context, such as autonomous learning and work capacity as well as team-work skills. Due to all this, it is concluded that fun acts as a force to foster knowledge.

All in all, university lecturers have the critical challenge of designing teaching methods which are more enjoyable in order to get students motivated, help them to acquire knowledge and encourage them to achieve basic competences which will be useful both for their university degree and their future career.

Keywords:

Teaching innovation, fun, competences, didactic images, photographs, practical activities.