Abstract:

This paper is aimed at showing how the combination of virtual and face to face learning facilitates and improves considerably the adaptation of universities to Bologna Process in courses of quantitative methods for business and economics. This paper presents the blended learning experience of Statistics for Business and Economics (Universidad de Huelva) as an example of succeeding at this aim.
The adaptation process of Spanish Universities in order to create a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) that began in 1998 after the Sorbonne Joint Declaration will finalize next academic year. The Bologna Process is being an important methodological challenge for university lecturers as a consequence of the implementation of competences based learning.
Competences based learning results on a methodological approach implying active and participative learning in higher education that requires a significant use of tutorials and the monitoring of the student performance in the framework of a continuous, formative and summative assessment of their teaching-learning process.
The course on Statistics for Business and Economics of Quantitative Methods for Business and Economics area of Universidad de Huelva covering descriptive statistics, probability theory and statistical inference basic contents consists of 12 credits and has more than 300 students enrolled this academic year. This course is lectured using a competence based learning approach characterized by theoretical, problems and statistical software face to face lectures supported with a virtual educative platform based on Moodle educative software package.
The implementation of continuous, formative and summative assessment together with the evaluation of the students would not have been possible without the extensive use of the tools provided by Moodle educative platform and multimedia software that provided with the possibility of implementing a extensive set of methodology that it is allowing assessing generic and specific competences of this course given the considerable number of students to be assessed and evaluated.
The preliminary results of the implementation of this methodological approach in Statistics for Business and Economics course is proving the advantages of this methodological change resulting in a considerably increase of the participation of the students and the number of them that finally pass the course.

Keywords:

blended learning, statistics, continuous assessment.