USING INCENTIVES FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE INVOLVEMENT OF STUDENTS IN ACADEMIC SUPPLEMENTARY ACTIVITIES: A CASE OF STUDY

Due to the demands of the new Spanish University Bachelors, the student must finish his career proving at least a B1 level in the English language. School of Cinema is a wider and consolidated project, developed within the Technological Campus of Puerto Real (University of Cádiz, Spain) that has proven to be very attractive for students because it facilitates the acquisition of second language during their studies using an easy and entertaining tool; the opened projection of different English-spoken movies (some, with subtitles in Spanish) in the Cinema Hall of the Campus along the course (once a week). In addition, applying students must enroll in the e-Learning Platform for this activity, with English teaching materials specific for each session. Finally, they have to perform different assessment tests in English.

Such attractive activity must have, in our opinion, a proper dissemination between the populations of students in the Campus (more than 5,000) and, then, requires an adequate advertising program that includes posters, massive e-mails, flyers… Now, we present a new incentive for the recruiting of participants in the academic activity: prior to the start, and with the aim of publicizing the academic sessions, it is performed the Annual Poster Contest "School of Cinema". It consists of an Open Contest for all the campus’ students trying to select the best main poster for advertising the Activity. A jury formed by art and advertisement specialists chooses the best proposals, which are awarded with several prizes (tablets, cinema bonus, etc.). It must be taken into account that ours is a Technological Campus with focusing in Sciences, Engineering, Marine studies, etc. and without any artistic discipline. We believe that this non-strictly academic and interdisciplinary competition strongly favors the spreading of the activity and the subsequent participation of students in the cinema sessions, since a large contestant’s posters exhibition is celebrated in the Main Hall of the Faculty the weeks before the event. It has been observed that since the contest is done, the percentage of student that applies the activity has raised a 300%.