THE APPLICATION OF THE EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION AREA IN SPAIN’S UNIVERSITIES: A FEW CHALLENGES

The European Higher Education Area is an educational organization based on the 1999 Bologna Declaration. The European Higher Education Area has resulted in two kinds of change: some of them de jure, involving credits, degrees and diplomas, etc. and others de facto concerning the teaching process. The former are aimed at facilitating the mobility of students in Europe. The latter are aimed at renewing methodologies to improve the teaching of students and bringing the student closer to the real exercise of the profession for which he/she is being prepared. The juridical dimension is purely the business of the European Higher Education Area. The second dimension is known as the Bologna Methodology and it has as its objective the building of a meaningful learning process. This involves changes in both philosophy (how university education should be planned and what the roles of the teacher and student should be, and the relationship between the two) as well as management (methods of evaluation). In this job, we present four challenges that have to be taken into account by most Spain’s Universities: evaluation by competencies, use of Information and Communication Technologies, movility of students and recognition of the teaching role.