Abstract:

Several collaborative tools associated with the successful emergence of Web 2.0 and social software, like blogs, wikis, or social bookmarking, are favouring the incorporation of new teaching and learning strategies in Higher Education. These instruments may contribute to a new redefinition of some para-digms in the present e-learning scenario at many Spanish universities, which mostly consists of providing digital contents, with a limited presence of collaborative on-line learning.
The course of Banking, Insurance, and Securities Market Law in the Degree of Actuarial Sciences at the University of Málaga is involved since 2002 in experimental projects on innovation in teaching and learning. These projects have been enhanced with the introduction of social software elements during the last two academic courses.
The course is heavily based on activities that students can manage and carry out on-line. Several tools coming from the field of social software have been fully integrated into the pedagogical system and are briefly described in the following.
i) Social bookmarking tools. The activities in this course require the management of many resources: legal dispositions, academic papers, news from newspapers, etc. A Delicious profile, created exclusively for the course, is provided to students to ease the collaborative administration of the electronic resources. In addition, through collaborative tagging, the students contribute to the collective creation of contents. This instrument is integrated into the Moodle platform with a tag cloud.
ii) Activities assessment with social tagging. The students assess the activities with a social bookmarking system, integrated into the Moodle platform, providing the teacher with their subjective opinions. A tag cloud with the skills developed in an activity, and the perceived levels of difficulty and effort are available for every activity.
iii) Wikis to manage group activities. Every year, the students must carry out a group project, managed through a wiki. These wikis work as rudimentary portfolios, easing the completion of the project to students as well as facilitating the evaluation tasks to the teacher.
The results of the integration of the described social software tools into the general pedagogical strategy of Banking, Insurance, and Securities Market Law during the last two years have proven effective in enhancing the learning process of the students, but also, as they mention, intensifying the feeling of collaborative working.

Keywords:

Social software, collaborative learning, actuarial, e-learning.