Abstract:

The Higher Education System (HES) implies the adoption of different education systems than the traditional ones. Subjects are defined in terms of competencies. The students need to achieve some specific competencies (based on the field of study) and some generic competencies (related with some capacities of the students with the environment, relationship, oral and writing communication, take decisions, work in a team, ethical behaviour in the job, leadership, motivation, and son on). In this way teacher have the need to use some new mechanisms to learn the matter under study. In this sense, the cooperative learning is a good mechanism to obtain a teaching quality. In this paper, we are going to analyse the use of this teaching mechanism and we will manifest the advantages of it.
The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) at Universities has been redesign in the last few years. The process starts in the definition of Process of Bologna in 1999. From this moment the countries belonging to the European Union have to adapt their learning and teaching strategies to some parameters. The students will make their subjects in terms of European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) credits instead of terms of hours. That implies the students will have to dedicate more numbers of hours to the personal work and the teachers will give less theoretical classes but they will have to design some interactive, practical and active mechanisms in order to improve the teaching.
At the same time, the Universities are designing a Quality Management System. This implies the creation and definition of some services, functions, personal, who need to be assessed regularly. The aim of these quality teams is to look for some ways to improve the functioning of the Faculties and Universities until this moment.
In spite of some people not consider these changes as important and relevant for teaching, their scepticism will be disappeared when the Universities have obtained some results in some years. The challenge is difficult and it is not easy to clarify the results in the future. But, we think that teachers have to be decided to make some changes and to be optimism about the improvement of the students.
Sherr and Teeter (1991) and Bateman and Roberts (1992) wrote two important books which stated that Total Quality Management could serve as a paradigm for improving every aspect of collegiate functioning including classroom instruction. Later, Deming (1994) suggested the linkage between quality management principles and education. He said that “… improvements of education, and the management of education, require application of the same principles that must be used for the improvement of any process or service”. Felder and Brent (1999) affirm the need and importance of improve the teaching in order to get a quality system.
The remainder of this article is structured as follows. First, we expose some ideas of the manner of achieving an improvement of teaching quality. At the same time, we explain the methods we could use. Next, we present the importance of cooperative learning and we add the advantages to follow this. This article concludes with a discussion of the significance of the study by the authors.

Keywords:

cooperative learning, teaching quality, higher education, business and.