Abstract:

The aim of this study is to compare the achievement of students’ business competences between students attending traditional classrooms and students studying online.

In order to analyse these effects we present an empirical study to know the relationship between the type of university and the achievement of competences. We will conduct the analysis from the point of view of the students’ real competences achievement according to the evaluation of their supervisors. In this sense, we use data from 485 students who produced their final bachelor’s degree project (FBP) in the business plan's specialization on a Business Administration and Management bachelor’s degree programme at two universities: a classroom-based university, the University of Barcelona (UB), and an online university, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).

With the reforms involved in the Bologna Process, studies on skills and their relationship with the teaching and learning process have risen considerably. Thus, we have seen that there are many experiences in the scientific literature addressed to the study of competences and their relationship to education and to the comparison of face-to-face and online methodologies. However, as far as we know, there are no studies that compare real acquisition of competences between a classroom-based and an online university.

Our main aim is to analyse if there are differences in how students achieve competences when developing a business plan, comparing the typology of university: face-to-face and online. The analysis shows that the level of acquisition of information and communication technologies (ICT) and ethics-related skills differs significantly. Students at the university with the classroom-based teaching method achieve better acquisition of ethics-related competences, while students who do their FBP at the online university achieve higher acquisition levels of ICT competences.

To sum up, we can conclude that levels of competence acquisition are not the same for students who study face to face or online when developing a final bachelor’s degree project and thus the teaching method used in producing a business plan influences acquisition of the competences.

Keywords:

Competences, Higher education, face-to-face, online, business plan.