Abstract:

European Higher Education Area (EHEA) teaching methodologies require numerous dynamic activities, in which the students must carry out different works in group, oral presentations and other activities which imply the autonomous learning and development of skills and competences of the degree. All the degree teachers must use these methodologies in their subjects. Therefore, the degree leaders must distribute chronologically these activities included in the teaching guides. In this way and taking into account the high experimental load of the engineering degree, it is necessary a good control and coordination between subjects and teachers in order to avoid the excess of workload which usually produce the neglect of the subjects or even the degree.

According to the previous objectives, different leader figures must be created. The most common leader is the Degree Coordinator, whose main competences consists of the organization of theoretical and practices timetables considering the availability of classrooms and laboratories of high school and the timetables of implied teachers. A second figure is generated and named Course Coordinators, which functions are related to the coordination and distribution of EHEA activities. They must plan the activities with the teachers of different subjects of the course in order to avoid temporal overlapping and also the repetition of same skills in different subjects. Other new figure is named Group Advisor, who orients the students group and must detect possible troubles related with the degree.

Taking into account the different leader figures of degree is necessary a high coordination between them. For it, a Committee of Quality of the Degree is formed, in which participate all coordinators and even a few representation of students (course delegates). Two external professional of the industry related to Materials Engineering are also invited to the Committee meetings. In these meetings, the detected problems and overlapping are treated and solutions are proposed for the next academic course.

Therefore, the coordination program has been essential for the Bologna methodologies implementation in the degree of Materials Engineering of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. It has been possible to detect quickly problems and faults during the first year that the degree was given and they were solved in that moment or during the next academic course. Also, this program allows to take into account the opinions and suggestions of the teachers, students and the own coordinators.

Keywords:

Bologna Process, skills, ECTS.