Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to describe the design and main features of a project of innovation in higher education developed for the degree in Actuarial Sciences and the new Master in Actuarial Sciences in the University of Málaga. The objectives of the project are focused on the efficient development of transversal competences, given their relevance in the new paradigm of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), and the difficulties of their acquisition and assessment in the current closed system of independent courses. The project is based on a collaborative process that implies teachers and students of different courses, in such a way that students get an integral view of the several disciplines involved in the degree in order to ease the development of generic and transversal competences.
We defined two sets of courses, each of them comprising courses (i) with complementary contents, (ii) belonging to different disciplines, and (iii) which may contribute to a development of an integral view of the actuarial phenomena and products. A series of collaborative e-learning activities has been designed for each group of courses. These activities necessarily imply the combined use of techniques and skills from several courses, and teachers of these courses simultaneously participate in their assessment. At least one conceptual map is required in every activity, as an element that reinforces the multidisciplinary and integrating component. In addition, the e-learning activities incentive the intensive use of the information and communication technologies (ICT’s) due to the digital format of the didactic resources as well as for the required online management of the workflows and availability of the results.
The design of the project and the development of the e-learning activities have been guided by three main criteria: (i) promoting the authenticity of the activities, aligning instruction and assessment in a contextualized framework, using information, contents and skills closer as possible to the real professional activity of the actuary; (ii) encouraging the students’ participation in the learning process, by several innovative mechanisms, like a module of identification and self-recognizing of competences (that we named the virtual laboratory of actuarial competences) and a module of subjective assessment of difficulty and competences relevance; and (iii) using a system of competences assessment that evaluates the level of development of every required competence, with a weighting scheme that is a priori known by the students, and allows the transversal evaluation by several teachers of different courses.

Keywords:

Competences, conceptual maps, collaborative learning.