Abstract:

Usually, the new students of the Master’s Degree in Actuarial Science at the Universidad de Málaga face their study program with very little familiarity with the actuarial sector and the profession, making it difficult a proper development of the required professional skills. This problem is aggravated by the complexity of these competences, which are often of a multidisciplinary nature and evolve at a very fast pace, according to the new trends in this sector, some of them resulting from the generalization of new technologies and the applications of big data and machine learning as well as from new regulations.

This background allows us to propose the use of multidisciplinary projects as an effective tool for developing professional competences. This proposal is the core of a project on learning and teaching innovation methods at the University of Málaga, that is being carried out in the academic course 2019-2020. Furthermore, assuming that implementing the multidisciplinary collaborative projects requires developing several transversal competences and involve different disciplines and courses, a special effort of coordination between lecturers and courses is needed, especially regarding time planning and contents design. Therefore, the project can also be used as an alternative strategy to achieve a more coordinated Actuarial education.

Accordingly, the general objectives of the project are:
(i) to facilitate an up-to-date perception by our students of the professional competences demanded by the actuarial labour market, encouraging a creative and critic attitude towards the new challenges in this sector,
(ii) to reinforce teamwork skills and
(iii) to incentive lecturers coordination by means of including in their courses multidisciplinary projects.

Thus, the aim of this article is to present a general depiction of the proposed methodology as well as the results of the first year of the project.

Keywords:

Collaborative projects, coordination, actuarial.