IMPROVING EDUCATION: A KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER MAP PROPOSAL FOR UNIVERSITY TUTORSHIP

Recently, in the academic course 2009-2010, the University of Burgos has incorporated a Tutorial Action Plan (PAT) in all Bachelor Degrees according the suggestions of Bologna Plan (Royal Decree 1393/2007, 29th of October).

The teacher staff commitment is a deeply binding key factor to the success of this initiative. Therefore, it is understandable a permanent worry about the performance of the tutorials.

The Vice-chancellor for Students has launched this innovative challenge with volunteer-teachers in the first course of Bachelor Degree going on to obligatory for the others in future academic years. In order to support the teachers it was organised a seminar with a practical bias as training tool; there was a debate about the tutorial types, teacher/tutor competences, planning and scheduling of the tutorials with the students, barriers, good manners and frequently asked questions; as support tool it was developed a Guide-book by the University Tutorship Group (GIDUT) and, eventually, a series of records were uploaded in the intranet of the university as work tool.

By considering an overview of the situation and the commitment of teachers and students we can state that the teacher participation has been utterly mediocre (a mere 12% in the last academic year), and as a consequence, it arises the necessity of reinforcing the tutorial system. Regarding this urgent drawback, the University of Burgos has declared the necessity to improve the system and adapt the Tutorial Action Plan by relying on knowledge management tools.

All in all, the objective is to design a knowledge transfer map, called 3T (Model of the Transfer Tutorial Teachers) in order to get two goals; on the one side, to facilitate teachers the path in the task of help the students in all their needing and to involve them actively, and, on the other side, to give answer to all the drawbacks regarding tutorials occurred so far by using technological tools.

The map consists of three levels. Interaction (teacher/student assessment), validation (teacher self-reflection and university evaluation) and regeneration (building a learning community).The tangible ratios to validate the map are measured in DOCENTIA (private university intranet platform of teachers professional work evaluation), such as, number of students tutored, number of individual meetings, among others. As enriching support, lessons learned will be a valuable activity to improve results.

Knowledge Transfer is understood as a tool to gather good results and considerable improvements in organizations; therefore, these facts justify the effort in developing a transfer knowledge model map to consolidate the university tutorship.