Abstract:

Sustainable education, understood in the broad sense of “education that lasts”, has a series of differential traits, and aligning educational policy and practice to this aspiration, is neither automatic nor easy. Additional complexity in this area is also conferred by new technology and its impregnation to all areas of life, education being no exception.

The e-learning paradigm has evolved to previously unimaginable presence, diffusion and impact, educators either opting for ready-to-use solutions, developing own ones or both. Since e-learning has become fundamental in any education context, different tools and environments to support it have been proposed. However, their application in real context are not as useful as their promised benefits. Focusing the attention to higher education, a multidisciplinary research and teaching staff team developed ACME (Avaluació Continuada i Millora de l'Ensenyament), Evaluation and Continuous Improvement of Education, as a solution for the automatic generation and evaluation complex exercises implemented in different universities, but mostly widespread at the University of Girona (Spain).

Understanding and correctly interpreting profit and loss accounts, balance sheets, calculating the brake-even point, or constructing cost analysis for decision making, as well as evaluating the impact and changes generated by some decisional options represent basic business administration concepts that could be beneficial for any future professional. But training non-technical subjects to technical studies coursing students requires special attention from the educator, especially in terms of motivational discourse, content selection, and -last but not less important- training method and class operative. In this particular case on own-developed drag-and-drop solution has been implemented and extended over years.

It is in this framework that we situate our present contribution that has the purpose to describe the experience of using a drag-and-drop e-learning solution for training fundaments of business administration to a cohort of technical studies coursing students at the University of Girona (Spain), its perceived benefits as well as its impact on academic results. Opting for the drag-and-drop type of individualised exercises appeared to be the ideal approach for gaining a correct understanding and allocation of concepts, often perceived as having high complexity and approached with lower motivation of big class cohorts of engineers. The present experience is part of a wider, more complex and complete e-learning solutions’ collection characterised with high automation for generating, correcting and grading personalised exercises.

The empirical evidence has been collected in the framework of three different subject, gathered under the generic name of fundaments of business administration, thought to 1st and 2nd year students coursing technical studies (industrial engineering, arquitecture and computer science). Perception assessment of students demonstrates a very good opinion about the learning experience using the proposed drag-and-drop tool. Beyond a series of benefits evaluated by students, teachers also experiment advantages, such as time gaining, (some type of) workload reduction, but also satisfaction and reward.

Keywords:

e-learning, Drag-and-Drop, Business, Engineering, Higher education, ACME.