Abstract:

The Bologna Process, with more than a quarter of a century of lifetime, introduced new paradigms in higher education like a common framework for higher education, encouraging international mobility and innovative approaches to learning and teaching. However, despite the time passing, in Spain, after the massive deployment of the new adapted studies in universities since 2010, most of the topics related to teaching and learning are lacking the expected success.

The competence-based learning model is frequently relegated to a secondary status, with conventional, content-centric pedagogical approaches being predominantly employed. A notable drawback is the absence of systematic supervision of students' workload, which, according to the European Credit Transfer System, is estimated to be approximately 25 to 30 hours per credit. This fundamental time unit is also the basis for subject design in higher education programs.

These autonomous work and study hours are typically left without any form of supervision or guidance. They are merely listed as a check value in the syllabus, serving as a metric to ensure that the study program has addressed the design report. In the Andalusian Higher Education System, for instance, the syllabus encompasses theoretical and practical components, competencies, and anticipated learning outcomes, in addition to assessment methods. However, it lacks specific information regarding the time allocation of students for each ECTS credit in a subject, considering that instructional or practical sessions are typically only 8 to 10 hours per credit. Consequently, a significant portion of the curriculum, ranging from 15 to 20 hours, remains unguided.

The absence of pertinent information regarding this crucial aspect of student work is occasionally addressed by individual subject teachers or task-specific instructors. These instructors may include a schedule or estimates of the time and students required to complete the task, which is also currently challenging to locate.

Therefore, with the teaching innovation project name “Autoactivate” we have addressed the problem of lack of guidance or autonomous work of students by proposing a series of previous tasks to face practical sessions. We have limited the scope of this project to practical work because we have deep experience in dealing with students in laboratories due to the main characteristics of the degrees and master’s program, we teach. The proposed tasks are thought to guide the preparation stage for the practical work, which under our experience, students left completely forgotten, arriving to the classroom or laboratory without any knowledge about the task they have to do in that session. Consequently, we have designed and proposed different materials to help students to prepare those sessions and for supporting them in achieving previous competences and theoretical concepts. These resources are mainly based on multimedia content (presentations, videos, etc.) or short reads that focus on key topics of the practical work and give some guidance about how to face the session. All these tasks are optional and they are also followed by a very short survey where the teacher can obtain feedback about the time spent in those tasks and the difficulties found by the students in the preparatory work.

The results showed that students who face this task perform better in the practical sessions, however it is difficult to correlate the exact impact of them in their final grade.

Keywords:

Higher education, European credit transfer system, practical teaching, multimedia teaching resources, autonomous work guiding.