Abstract:

In the academic year 2010-2011, the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) started the first and second courses of the Chemical Engineering degree (ChED) adapted to the European Higher Education Area. The aim of this degree is to provide a training that allows future graduates to develop their professional work in the field of engineering with the professional responsibilities contained in the Order of the Ministry of Science and Innovation, CIN/351/2009 (BOE 20/02/2009).
The implementation of the new degrees according to the European Higher Education Area, among other duties, implies to establish a coordination protocol including actions at both the horizontal (among subjects of the same course) and at the vertical (among subjects of different courses) levels. In addition, the development of standardized teaching guides for each subject, including detailed teaching and assessment methodologies, and a system to check the attainment of the established generic competences must be accomplished.
In the present work, the actions developed in the present academic year to coordinate the second course of the ChED at the USC are presented. The actions carried out implied the joint action of the degree coordinator, the course coordinator and the subject coordinator if there were more than one responsible teacher. In particular, the main functions assigned to the course coordinators included: organize a meeting with all the teachers of the course at the beginning of each semester in order to establish the main basis of the course coordination process and at the end to analyze the results obtained; analyze the workload of the students and its distribution among the different subjects of the course; coordinate the delivery deadlines for proposed tasks among the different subjects; and monitor how the generic competences proposed in each subject have been worked.
In order to achieve the proposed goals a Google calendar has been created for the course and used as the only calendar for introducing activities, task delivery, dates of group tutorials, etc. for all the subjects the whole the course. Students could consult the calendar either in the web page of the School of Engineering or in the virtual courses (Blackboard platform) of various subjects. The aim was to work with a single tool that, on one hand, allowed teachers to make a well distributed proposal of tasks/activities, to avoid overload of work at certain times and, on the other, that students had an overview of all activities to be performed. The main drawback, at first, was to introduce teachers in the use of the tool, that was unknown for most of them, and to accustom students to consult it.
Regarding the achievement of the generic competences, a questionnaire with a list of resources to be used by teachers and/or students in the interactive classes (case study, problem solving, cooperative working, oral and written communication, computer applications, etc.) has been developed and covered for all the subjects of the course.
In view of the results of the present academic year, several proposals have arisen to improve future coordination which include, firstly, to improve the use of the Google calendar and the questionnaire elaborated for analyzing competences and, secondly, to involve students in the coordination process making them aware of the need for their collaboration to provide their opinions, necessary to have the view of all the parts involved in the educational process.

Keywords:

Course coordination, activities schedule, Google calendar.