LEARNING THROUGH ACTIVITIES: A CASE STUDY

This work arises within an attempt to adapt a subject to the European Space of Higher Education. This new framework implies an authentic revolution in the teaching-learning process. It is a hard change where both lecturers and students have to make an effort to adapt to the new guidelines announced by the Bolonia process. First of all, the subjects are conceived as a list of competences the students must reach. Secondly, students must leave the passive practice of listening to the lecturer and they must become more active. In turn, the role of the lecturers is mainly focused on designing activities that encourage this practice and that allow students to achieve the competences of the subjects. Finally, a new mechanism of assessment must be designed in order to establish if the students are reaching the competences of the subjects or not. A continuous tracking of the student is the practice that in a way is imposed by this new paradigm.
The set up of the competences of a subject is a previous step that not only depends on the lecturers, otherwise other institutional staff as the Departments or the University itself is involved. This is the reason why the point of departure of this work does not include this task, but we assume the consensus reached at all institutional levels about the adequate competences of the subject.
This work focused on a careful and adequate design of activities and its tracking of assessment performed in a subject we teach. The design is elaborated according to the competences of the subject, including those related to the competences of the qualifications and those named transversal competences. First of all, several materials are elaborated by lecturers to guarantee students successfully are able to carry out the activities. Students are asked to analyze the materials, to solve some toy examples alone or in groups as a self-assessment and to raise the doubts and difficulties with the lecturers and other students, creating a kind of debate. This practice encourages the interaction both among students and between them and the lecturers that provides useful information to the lecturers to keep a control over the competence acquirement and to lead the course of the subject to assure the success of this acquirement. Then, students are asked to elaborate a proposal of the activities they are going to solve, but under certain constraints imposed by the lecturers. This practice allows them setting the activities in a topic of their interests adding a piece of motivation to the students. Two transversal competences, namely originality and creativity, play an important role at this point. Besides, the correct elaboration of the proposal and its correct resolution require reaching the specific competences of the subject. The activities are sequentially related in the sense that all of them configure a small project. This relation causes the necessity of including a feedback in each activity in order not to accumulate mistakes in the project and in order to consolidate acquired competences and to favour reaching others. In addition, lecturers think that adding a personal component to the activities and including feedback in the resolution might contribute to avoid the absenteeism and to reduce the drop-out rate that universities have been suffering during the last years. At least, an improvement on the performance of the students was achieved.