Abstract:

The European Higher Education Area (EEES) has meant one of the most important challenges and transformations the traditional university teaching model has faced in recent decades. This new education system causes a radical change in the university world, where students are now the protagonist of the acquisition of their own knowledge and the teacher becomes the manager of said learning process. In particular, this latter has to act as an instructor and guide for the students in order to achieve said knowledge. All this has been a real novelty in university systems such as the Spanish, where master classes, as a mechanism for transmitting knowledge from teacher to student, must be combined with other teaching methodologies and activities that allow students to be more actively involved in their learning process and that provide a favorable framework for the acquisition of new skills.

In this framework, the design of more active teaching methodologies and the establishment of evaluation models that allow assessing the acquisition of said competencies have become essential tasks for university teachers. Furthermore, the teaching method has become a resource in order to be able to encourage students to achieve “authentic learning”. In all this process of change, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) play a key role with the aim of integrating, developing, and managing resources for teaching, as well as for dynamic, flexible, and participatory collaborative learning.

At the same time, the econometrics subjects are widely considered complex by undergraduate students, as it is revealed in the assessment surveys and as it can be seen in their global grades. To improve the academic performance of our students and promote their participatory learning, in the Degree in Economics at the University of Cantabria (UC) we have carried out a teaching innovation project focused on the development of new teaching materials implemented using ICTs.

The main objectives that are intended to be achieved with the project can be summarized as the following:
1) Improve the overall levels of academic performance of our students, encourage active student learning, and avoid dropping out of the subject.
2) Ensure the acquisition of the necessary skills for these subjects, which will favor the correct transfer of knowledge to higher-level subjects of this branch of knowledge.
3) Favor the work of follow-up and motivation of the teacher during the teaching-learning process using more active teaching techniques that encourage student involvement and participation. It also requires a detailed planning of the subject by sessions, so that the student knows in each one of them the activities that are going to be developed, the resources that must be used, and the work that corresponds to him to carry out on his own.

Further, it is absolutely necessary to identify the main weaknesses and strengths of the methods implemented to decide whether more changes have to be done the next academic year. Specifically, the information from the different evaluations carried out (continuous evaluation, ordinary and extraordinary final evaluation) is used and it is compared with the calls of the previous courses. In addition, the student’s assessment of the impact they consider these new methodologies have had on their learning process is taken into account. To do this, this information is collected through an anonymous survey.

Keywords:

Undergraduate education, pedagogical innovations, active and experimental learning, assessment of student learning.