IMPLEMENTING VIRTUAL PLATFORMS IN MANAGEMENT TEACHING: THE CASE OF THE BUSINESS DEPARTMENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ALCALÁ

The University of Alcalá (UAH) has recently started to implement the new European educative model, some degrees are already in their second year but most of them have started this academic course. As the new educative model proposes basing education in learning competences and not in storing information, teachers have to do a big effort to change methodologies and ensure this competence acquisition. One of the tools that can be used are virtual platforms.
Many things have been said about the benefits of using new technologies and platforms in order to improve graduate teaching but there is a lack of information about the real use of them in two senses:
- On the one hand about if is it really being used by most of teachers and what are the main barriers they find in the use of platforms.
- On the other hand, about the proper use of the platform itself (number of used tools, up to what point are they taking advantage of the tool, student motivation to use it...). This should be a completely different research.
Main objective of this research is to analyze what are mayor barriers that teachers of Business Science Department from the UAH have in order to implement the use of virtual platforms as a support of attendance lessons.
Business Science Department can be quite representative of the general situation of the whole institution as it is composed by 70 teachers that develop their activities in 123 courses of 23 different degrees without including master level (currently there are 41 Official Studies and 15 Official Graduate Programs all over the university).
The methodology we have used is the following:
- Firstly we have designed an inquiry divided into three groups of questions: first group is related to the teacher profile, second group is related to the barriers that non users find in order to start using any platform, and third group is related to problems detected by platform users in their daily work. There has been no distinction between the platforms that can be used by teachers, so they can be the ones provided by the own university or any other preferred by the teacher.
- Second step has been sending the inquiry by e-mail to all the teachers of the department. E-mail was chosen as the best option because it allowed us contact with teachers in less time and was easier for them sending the answer (even if they are not teaching this term we are able to contact them).
- Third step is data treatment using SPSS software
- Fourth step will be analyzing the results and building final conclusions. As we are still working with data we are not able to provide any result yet but work will be done very soon.
We expect to get significant differences in the use (or lack of it) between teachers depending on the position they occupy, total number of credits they teach and other activities they do inside or outside the university (such as participating in study/quality/international committees, managing other institutions, being representatives in the university councils...)
We will also get the main reasons because of which some teachers are unwilling to use platforms as a complement to the attendance lessons. Analyzing these reasons and solving them should be a must for the university as an institution in order to ensure that part-time students are able to get the materials they need to study, they receive a non-attending tuition and they have the opportunity of being evaluated by the acquisition of competences and knowledge.