TEAMWORK AS A LEARNING TOOL IN STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT: AN EXPERIENCE TO APPROACH THE EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION AREA TO THE UNIVERSITY OF ALICANTE

One of the challenges posed by the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is the change in the way to evaluate students, going from an assessment mainly based on a final exam to a continuous, formative-oriented assessment. The EHEA additionally suggests the need to go from a university education based essentially on the teaching provided by lecturers, where they own all the relevant knowledge that they will transmit to their students, to a different one focused on student learning. This is the context where our work can be placed since, seeking to adapt to the European convergence framework, we have tried to implement a continuous, formative evaluation method for the subject Dirección Estratégica y Política de Empresa I (DEPEI) [Strategic Management and Business Policy I] in the Business Administration and Management Degree, based on the case method, encouraging both active participation and collaborative work among students.

Our teaching initiative was carried out in the practical part of the DEPEI subject and consisted in the discussion of long cases proposed by the lecturer in advance. The cases had to be developed by groups formed by a maximum of 4 students, so that there were two groups participating for each one of the cases proposed by the lecturer: one of them presented the case and the other one made a reply to it. Both activities (discussion and reply) formed part of the final mark.

246 out of 311 enrolled students took part in the study (which represents a percentage of 79.1%), as some students freely chose to lose a part of their mark because they preferred not to do the autonomous collaborative work.

Thanks to this collaborative work scheme, students have developed leadership, communication, confidence, decision-making and conflict-resolution skills. Another outcome of this scheme is related to the co-evaluation process, which has been implemented through the reply in our research, as the students who make a reply to the case previously presented by another team would be assessing that case.