Abstract:

The highly technological and complex society of our global XXI Century society poses critical challenges to the role of the university education, but also great opportunities. Some of them are related to our highly international classroom within the European Higher Educational Area (EHEA). Other ones are related to the spectacular availability of academic and professional information through new information technologies to society at large, which may be paradoxically developing a “knowledge mirage.” The European university should respond to these challenges strengthening its bridging role between academic knowledge and professional competences for a competitive Europe of professional excellence. To do so, the university should be able to adapt to the highly diverse learning skills and professional potentials of our international classroom, through proper academic management quality models. Currently there are several organizational models coming from the business field, such as customer-relationship management, competence and knowledge management, value chains and networks, or just-in-time approaches, which include important efforts to use new technologies to satisfy customer changing demands and needs, and offer interesting references to include in the analysis towards university management models centred on learning diversity.

The results of a management-research program aimed at reaching an academic model intended to respond to these challenges and opportunities within the EHEA are here analysed. As main hypothesis it was stated that the degree of personalized student relationship will be the main predictor of students´ academic achievement and development of learning and professional potentials. The research program methodology was designed as an intrinsic part of the academic management model, with participatory research as a tool of a progressive development of the management design, implementation, and evaluation, through a series of actions centred on personalized university-student relationship processes. The program was carried out at the School of Psychology of IE University (Segovia, Spain). 21 professors and 10 student groups (sizes between 10 and 35) participated in the program. Different management indicators and educational teacher and student quantitative (questionnaires), qualitative (individual and group interviews), and participatory (group dynamics) techniques were used to analyse impacts of management changes on academic performance, results, and achievements.

Results support the main hypothesis. According the management program evolved to a more relationship-centred approach, academic performance features continuously improved, such as academic evaluations by students and professors, students´ satisfaction, motivation and active implication in their own learning process, professors´ knowledge and implication in students specific needs and potentials, higher use of a diversity of educational methods by students and professors, more clarified students´ career planning and goals, and indices of employment achievements after university. Based on these results, a university-student relationship management model is proposed, using new technologies to favour a synergic integration of all management processes in the relationship with the student, to enable a personalized, diversity-centred learning process increasing efficacy and reducing costs.

Keywords:

University-management, innovation-in-education, European-Higher-Educational-Area, Consumer-relationship-management, knowledge-management.