TRANSVERSAL COMPETENCES IN NUCLEAR ENGINEERING STUDIES: IMPROVING THE COORDINATION

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) provides, as one of its main objectives, to guarantee that students acquire a series of specific and transversal competences at the end of the different degrees. The Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) has established a project in order to offer the university graduates a value-added differentiation and a mean to demonstrate their capabilities through 13 transversal competences that globally characterizes their profile. In this regard, the UPV has developed a strategic plan to evaluate and to certify the acquisition of such skills through three different ways: the degrees, the Bachelor’s/Master’s Thesis and extracurricular activities. The internal coordination of the UPV is essential to ensure that the students work to acquire all the skills in all the different levels of the degree studies through the three mentioned ways, as well as to define the working and evaluation criteria.

The aim of this work is to establish a methodology to systematize the activities and tasks related to the coordination of these transversal competences in the field of the nuclear engineering, in the subjects taught at the Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Department. The department provides teaching in subjects related with the generation and use of the energy, such as renewable energy, nuclear energy, thermohydraulic and applications of ionizing radiation, among others. In this situation, a coordination task is needed to synthesize all the specific contents to ensure the correct design, development and evaluation of the competences. This coordination is a complex task and is subjected to internal and external reviews, such as those carried out in the accreditation process "Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)". In this frame, it is necessary to reach a definition of each competence establishing common indicators for all the subjects to characterize the graduate profile.

As a result of this work, it has been established and clarified the corresponding competences and levels for the different subjects in the nuclear field. Specific learning outcomes and rubrics to assess the degree of compliance of the competences have been developed in function of the course and simultaneity. The enhancement of the coordination allows to facilitate the communication in the working group improving the assessment of the competences.