Abstract:

The consolidation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has brought with it several profound changes in the university environment and the process of design, evaluation and implementation of new curricula. The reshaping of degree courses, the introduction of a new credit accounting system focused on student workload (the European Credit Transfer System - ECTS) and methodologies for competence learning, are three central features of this new educational paradigm.

In this new context, Spanish universities have been very careful in defining the competences that students must achieve through new degree and postgraduate courses. However, they have paid less attention to the question of how these competences should be measured.

In that sense, this paper explains our experience in assessing bachelor student’s competences by applying a digital platform called Evolute developed by Tampere University of Technology in Finland (Kantola, 2009; Kantola, 2005; 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. Each competence model is based on a specific ontology according to the target domain (Paajanen et al., 2009). In particular, we apply an evaluation tool called Cycloid, which was specifically designed for self-evaluating the project managers’ generic and specific competencies.

This tool has been implemented in several subjects related to the Management area taught in the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Barcelona, during the 2011-2012 academic course. The purpose of this analysis is to study in depth the profile of competences of our bachelor students to improve the design and contents of the subjects taught. In other words the analysis of the actual students’ strengths and weaknesses will help us to improve in the future the curricula currently designed.


References:
Kantola, J. “Ontology-Based Resource Management”. Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing, Vol. 00, No. 0, 2009, pp.1–13.
Kantola, J. Ingenious management. Doctoral thesis, Tampere University of Technology at Pori, Finland, 2005.
Kantola, J.; H. Vanharanta & W. Karwowski, “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, 2005.
Vanharanta, H. Plenary at HCI International Conference 2005, Las Vegas, Nevada, 22-27 July, 2005
Paajanen, P., Porkka, P., Paukku, H. and Vanharanta, H. (2009). Development of personal and organizational competencies in a technology company. Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries, 19(6), 568–581.

Keywords:

Competency assessment, ICT, European Higher Education Area (EHEA).