Abstract:

A key element in the design of teaching and learning methodologies, according to the new European Space for Higher Education, is the development of competences. These are to be understood as skills, academic contents, and attitudes that students must acquire in order to get an adequate accomplishment in the labour market. Therefore, the current didactic strategies should be adapted in this new direction, favouring an integral instruction, which eases a continuous tuning of the future professionals to the changing conditions of the market, and a permanent update of their knowledge.
The highly professionalized profile of the actuary career, as well as the little familiarity of the general public and the first year students with it, were the reasons that motivated the creation of a virtual observatory of competences in several courses of the Degree in Actuarial Sciences at the University of Málaga. The objectives of the observatory are that the student:
- Identifies the professional competences of the actuary
- Identifies the specific competences in the course and their contribution to the acquisition of the actuary’s competences
- Carries out these activities in a collaborative on-line environment
The observatory has three temporal stages. First, students suggest, compare and discuss elemental skills through a wiki. To do this, teachers provide several multi media resources with academic and professional information. Second, students evaluate their partners’ suggestions using anonymous on-line questionnaires. Finally, working in groups, a collective proposition of the competences to be developed in the course is obtained.
The results of our virtual observatory in the last two years were very positive. The students’ par-ticipation was plentiful and they declared that this activity improved their learning process and helped them to put in context many of the content of the courses.

Keywords:

Competences, actuarial, collaborative learning, e-learning.