Abstract:

Over the last years an increasing interest exists in the development of new educational methodologies that stimulate and encourage learning and development of students’ different skills and competences. Some of these methodologies rely largely to “learn by doing”. Learning experiences are then designed and these experiences are varied and may have a large scope of application. With regard to the diversity, there are experiences that are inspired or supported by the arts –music, plastic arts or drama, among others-, some of them have been conducted outdoors, others are based on new technologies and there are even experiences combining some of the others. Our interest is focused in the study of the utility of the arts (recently music and plastic arts) to learning and the stimulus that supposes going doors out. In terms of scope, learning experiences can be applied, for example, in business management and, within it, in learning of many different topics. It may be the case, among others, of the functions of management: planning, organisation, human resources management and control.
The challenge facing us is to design such learning experiences. But we think it is possible to resort to using the tool that proposes to look out of the organisation for the best practices, to learn of them and to use these practices at the organisational improvement. We refer to benchmarking. However, looking for the best practices to design experiences with which the student could learn and assimilate the manager’ functions, we do not have why to limit ourselves either to the managerial area or to the academician but we can resort to the arts. In this sense, the music and, more specifically, the action of the conductor may be the benchmark of best practices from which to design learning experiences of the managerial functions. We then sought the collaboration of a conductor and with your support, we plan to develop targeted learning experiences to our students in business management. But previously, we will devote this paper to justify, develop and implement the above benchmarking. We will analyse, therefore, the use of benchmarking in this case, the necessary steps in its application and the procedure for their development.

Keywords:

Benchmarking, learning experiences, management.