Abstract:

In the context of the European Higher Education Area the Universities have to certify explicitly that students finish their studies with certain competences. In this sense, Spanish universities have been very careful in defining the competences that students must achieve within the new graduate and postgraduate courses. However, they have paid less attention to the question of how these competencies should be measured.
In that sense, the purpose of this paper is to study in depth the profile of the acquired competences of the bachelor students in several subjects related to the Management area taught in the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Barcelona. The actual students’ strengths and weaknesses will be analysed in order to improve the design and contents of the subjects taught, also increasing the quality of the curricula currently available.
More specifically, the focus is on validating an instrumenting data collection that can support teaching staff in analysing and evaluating the acquisition and mastery of competences among their students and on examining the utility of competences self-assessment in order to provide feedback about the progress of students. Further, this study will provide useful information for the quality management of bachelor’s programmes.
This paper explains an experience in assessing bachelor student’s competences by applying a digital platform called Evolute developed by Tampere University of Technology in Finland (Achcaoucaou et al., 2012, Kantola et al. 2005; Vanharanta, 2005). This is an ICT-based digital platform designed for the self-assessment of personal and social competences, and it uses different models of competences for a range of specific work role profiles. In particular, we apply an evaluation tool called Cycloid, which was specifically designed for self-evaluating the project managers’ generic and specific competencies.
The authors of this research (http://www.ub.edu/gidea) have previous experience in implementing Cycloid in different subjects in the area of Management. Specifically, in the previous edition of INTED 2012 and INTED 2013 the results of its implementation in the subjects of Business Economics and Operations Management were presented. In this new edition, we present the results obtained from the use of the tool by 100 students of the Strategic Management course.

References
Achcaoucaou, F.; Guitart-Tarrés, L.; Miravitlles-Matamoros, P.; Núñez-Carballosa, A.; Bernardo, M.; Bikfalvi, A. (2012): “Competence Assessment in Higher Education: A Dynamic Approach”. Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries 00 (0) 1–14 (In press). Available at: wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hfm DOI: 10.1002/hfm.20394

Kantola, J.; Vanharanta H.; Karwowski, W. (2005): “The Evolute system: A co-evolutionary human resource development methodology.” In W. Karwowski (Ed.), International encyclopedia of ergonomics and human factors (pp. 2894–2900). Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Vanharanta, H. (2005): Plenary at HCI International Conference 2005, Las Vegas, Nevada, 22-27 July, 2005

Keywords:

Competences evaluation, Strategic Management course, Evolute digital platform, Faculty of Economics and Business.