Abstract:

The European Higher Education Area promotes a competency-based evaluation using varied and innovative assessment tools. In this line, in the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain, the reports of the evaluation of the Master in Agricultural Engineering and the Degree in Agricultural and Rural Engineering aimed to improve the competency-based learning. For this, rubrics are valuable tools aligned with competences and highly recommended in a competency-based learning.

Additionally, in previous projects we have verified that students need to strengthen the G15 competence of critical thinking and social networks are a familiar instrument for students that allows strengthen this competence. After having tested the Rubrics and CoRubrics software in the evaluation of competences in previous projects, we intuit that we can simplify the assessment process using the institutional Moodle platform, widely used by students and teachers at the University of Valladolid. In addition, the loss of face-to-face teaching on March 14, 2020 due to the pandemic COVID-19 requires, at this time, to look for flexible instruments in the teaching-learning process, including the evaluation. The aim of this teaching innovation project is to design a flexible evaluation itinerary (off-line/on-line), developing learning objects (e-rubrics) and their application in the evaluation of the competences of the agricultural students at the University of Valladolid with special attention to the G15 competence of critical thinking utilizing social networks and comparing the use of Moodle with respect to Rubrics and CoRubrics software.

The methodology includes:
i) the design of the evaluation itinerary,
ii) the elaboration of e-rubrics,
iii) its implementation in Agricultural Degrees and Masters at the University of Valladolid,
iv) the comparison of the assessment tools functionalities and
v) the evaluation and dissemination of the results.

The expected results are, the alignment of the evaluation with the competences, the student's follow-up of his own activity, favouring the responsibility towards learning and the self-evaluation of the quality of his work and the ways in which it could be improved.

Keywords:

Innovation, competency-based assessment, critical thinking, social media, rubrics tools.