Abstract:

The didactic strategies constitute a response to the curricular changes in innovation in the resources for professors in several countries. Recently, the application of those that are considered the most effective carriers of innovations has been generalized. Those strategies are: Cooperative Learning, Problem Based Learning, Project Oriented Learning, and, most recently, the Service-Learning and Research Based Learning (This strategy are recognized also as Research Oriented Learning or Inquiry Based Learning).

A strategy, in a strict sense, is an organized and formal procedure oriented to the acquisition of a clearly delimited goal. Its application in the daily educational practice requires the improvement of the procedures and techniques that the professor has the responsibility to chose and design. According to Avanzini, a strategy is always a result of the correlation and the conjunction of three components: the institutional mission; the courses, contents and knowledge that form the educational process; and the conception formed around the student and his attitude towards the scholar tasks.

The most innovative strategies are defined by certain characteristics such as: being centered in the learning process and oriented to the construction of knowledge; determine the structure of the whole scholar program by generating a vertical dynamic, professor-student, and a horizontal one, student-student, with the mediation of learning tools and instruments. In higher education every reform or new curriculum proposes the incorporation of some of these strategies. That’s why it is important to pay attention to the experiences of some institutions around the world which, by successfully applying the strategies, has achieved place them as a model of teaching. That’s how they managed to be considered internationally as one of the best educational practices.

This paper proposes, based in our experience, the incorporation of teaching strategies in technological platforms (Blackboard, Moodle, Web CT, AVA, etc.) by designing learning activities (rather than teaching ones) structured according to the methodological steps of the strategies. From this perspective, the working spaces of the database take back the real function for which they were created.

This document was developed from a vision of the didactic strategies already incorporated in the courses design for a technological platform. In the other hand, what we put forward here is the result of the observation and joined analysis of some of the best practices in institutions of several countries, everything seen through the eyes of our own educational experience gathered in the universities where we work.

Keywords:

Didactic Innovation, Didactic strategies, Cooperative Learning, Problem Based Learning, Project Oriented Learning.