Abstract:

University students are used to attend traditional sessions where the teacher explains theoretical lessons, the contents of which are then applied in practical sessions with identical scripts established to follow the same scheme in practice and theory. This scheme of operation has been traditionally followed, but in some cases it has caused fatigue and lack of motivation to the students.

In the subject “Organizational Behavior and Change Management” (formerly “Comportamiento Organizativo y Gestión del Cambio”) in the Degree of Informatics Engineering, we have been getting some feedback from students on how to improve the results of the students learning results (Hortigüela et al. 2015). Consequently to the received feedback, we have decided to put into practice the participation of external speakers (with high experience in topics related to the subject) who show students the most important values ​​of the content of the subject learning guide, through dynamic group discussion sessions where different topics from those studied in the theoretical sessions are discussed in practical sessions.

In this paper we propose the participation of external speakers in practical sessions, as a way to break the routine of academic courses (where teacher of the subject is usually the only speaker in both practical and theoretical sessions). We want to assess the impact that this breakage of the routine can cause in the improvement of the students' perception regarding the evolution of the classes.

The second impact that we want to measure is how it affects the motivation of the students, in the practical sessions, the proposal of topics of debate which are very different from the theoretical themes of the subject, but at the same time, they are directly related to the subject itself.

In summary, the expected result of this practical research activity is the evaluation of how students react to these unexpected practical sessions, in an unexpected environment, and with unexpected speakers. This impact will be measured based on the improvement of the assessment that students show as a result of their practical learning.

Keywords:

Organizational Behavior, Change Management, Informatics Engineering, Psychology, Group Dynamics, Relationships.