Abstract:

For more than three decades, efforts have been made to achieve the consensus that higher education should train professionals with subject-specific knowledge and skills and generic competencies that will enable them to perform successfully in their studies, jobs, and social life contexts. This requires the adoption of curriculum design approaches capable of contextualizing the form and scope of these crucial generic competencies to support both student learning on the course and graduate attributes for employability and career progression.

Despite the long history of the concept of generic competencies, the integration of these generic competencies into discipline-specific learning outcomes remains a challenge today. Moreover, it has recently become clear that the definition and approach to generic competencies in higher education requires a context-dependent perspective, given the peculiarities of each subject area.

Aware of this difficulty, the Spanish Institute of Engineering has promoted the creation of a forum in which different Spanish higher education institutions involved in Engineering participate. The aim of this forum is analysing and improving the treatment of generic skills in ingeneering degrees. The School of Agricultural, Food and Biosystems Engineering (ETSIAAB), one of the institutions participating in the forum, is taking advantage of the analysis of its curricula to initiate a project focused on improving the generic skills defined for their programs of study.

The ETSIAAB offers degrees in Biotechnology, in Agricultural Sciences and Bioeconomy, in Agricultural Engineering, in Agro-environmental Engineering, and in Food Engineering, in addition to the master's degree in Agricultural Engineering. All these programs include generic skills that were formulated in accordance with current regulations. But this formulation lacked documentation and experience on the integration of generic skills into specific curricula. In recent years, an intense effort has been made by faculty to contemplate in each subject the generic skills assigned. However, during the latest accreditation processes to which the degrees have been involved, both by national and international accreditation agencies, certain discrepancies and deficiencies have been found in the evidence of planning, implementing, and assessing generic skills.

For professors, developing educational activities and, above all, assessing the acquisition of transversal competencies is a real challenge because these competencies require relevant innovations in teaching/learning practices, in assessment procedures and in the organization of the subject itself.

The objective of the project developed at the ETSIAAB is to harmonize the formulation, teaching methodologies and assessment systems of the generic skills defined in the four degrees and in the master's degree taught at the centre.

In the coordination committees of programs, it has been verified that professors require training and institutional support for planning and implementing educational activities integrated with specific content and, above all, assessing the acquisition of generic skills.

The educational innovation project developed at the ETSIAAB-UPM has promoted a working team with the aim of addressing the harmonisation of the formulation, teaching methodologies and assessment systems of the generic skills assumed by the centre, all this considering the specificities of the curricula of each program.

Keywords:

Key skills, assessment rubric, generic competences.