PROTOCOL FOR THE IMPLEMENTATION OF NEW TEACHING TOOLS: COMPETENCES AND ABILITIES ACQUIRED BY STUDENTS

September 2010 is the deadline for all Spanish universities to adapt their courses to the requirements of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The University of Barcelona Teaching Innovation Group on Learning Tools in Business Management, G•IDEA(*) has been actively involved in the adaptation process for some time. As a result, we now have a series of digital teaching resources that have been thoroughly tested and are now in operation in several courses in Business Organization and in degree programs at the Faculty of Economics and Business.

The work so far has been described in papers presented at international congresses in the area of teaching innovation, such as:
* New tools for autonomous learning in business management, ICERI’08 (International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation), Madrid, 17, 18 and 19 November, 2008.
* Digital Teaching Resources in the Business Management Field, EDULEARN’09 (International
Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies), Barcelona, 6, 7 and 8 July, 2009.

Now that we have the tools at our disposal, the following research questions arise: How can these tools help students to acquire competences? How can competence acquisition be measured? What level of mastery do our students attain with these teaching resources?

To answer these questions, we have designed a protocol for the implementation of teaching tools and a satisfaction survey which includes the evaluation of the resources available for the acquisition of competences and abilities such as:
* Learning capacity
* Autonomy and responsibility
* Communicative ability
* Competence for teamwork
* Competence for initiating decisive and entrepreneurial activities
* Competence for project management and information
* Personal and work ethics
* Capacity for analysis and synthesis
* Capacity for critical insight and evaluation
* Capacity for problem detection

This paper presents the results obtained with the protocol for the implementation of teaching tools and the results of this satisfaction survey on the competences and abilities acquired by our students.


(*) Grup d’Innovació Docent en Eines d’Aprenentatge en Direcció d’Empreses (http://www.ub.es/gidea/)