DIGITAL LIBRARY
GLOBAL COORDINATION AMONG THE SUBJECTS OF A DEGREE: APPLICATION TO CHEMICAL ENGINEERING BACHELOR
Universidad de Cádiz (SPAIN)
About this paper:
Appears in: ICERI2014 Proceedings
Publication year: 2014
Pages: 5453-5458
ISBN: 978-84-617-2484-0
ISSN: 2340-1095
Conference name: 7th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation
Dates: 17-19 November, 2014
Location: Seville, Spain
Abstract:
In all degrees, the subjects included throughout the corresponding years are ordered by level of complexity. In this way, there are a large number of subjects in the different courses with a direct relationship in their contents, and it is often recommended that students have completed previous subjects that are considered essential to develop the new concepts of a following subject. Basic subjects are normally taught by different departments than those that teach more specific subjects, and many times there is not a good integration/coordination among subjects. In order to coordinate the contents and to manage a close relationship among the different subjects of a grade, it is really important for professors to know exactly which contents have been learned or will be learned in the others subjects, at what level of depth and which practical activities have been carried out by the students.

In many cases, when a professor designs his subject, the following questions may arise about previous and/or following subjects: what have students learned exactly in a previous subject? How deep have they gone in the contents? What nomenclature was used? Have they come to solve practical problems and cases? How many practices and what kind of them? What tools or methods did the students use to solve them? What will the student need exactly form my subject to study the following subjects? What examples can I use from the following subjects?, etc. And similarly occurs in the case of the laboratories contents. None of these questions are answered if a professor has only access to the basic information included in the records published for the subjects.

This project does a review in detail all the contents that have been incorporated in all subjects, laboratory practices, to make possible to identify potential overlaps or repetitions among subjects agendas, identifying any discrepancies between the nomenclature used by different professors, or the existence of a lack of contents not included in any of the subjects. This horizontal and vertical coordination among all subjects is only possible collecting all the teaching materials in all subjects (including the development of each topic, classroom presentations, unresolved problems and issues, practical scripts, etc.) and establishing a map of relationships among all subjects. In this way, it will certainly improve the knowledge of the degree by the professors involved, which may lead to a better design of the content and activities of the subjects.
Keywords:
Coordination, contents, subjects relationships.