HOW ONLINE APPLICATIONS CAN HELP TO ACHIEVE AN INTEGRAL EDUCATION

The development of transversal competencies provides an integral education. However, its practical implementation among different subjects is not a trivial task. There are several issues that should be previously solved in an optimal way to take advantage of the synergy among subjects. Main issues are: i) the need for a common space for the documents management, ii) the availability of the document everywhere and anytime, and iii) the possibility to collaborate in the documents edition tasks.

In this work, we have implemented a virtual portfolio for the students, which allow the assessment of all the subjects in a global way. To this goal we used the Google apps due to its free access, availability and suitability for the collaborative editing tasks.

We started analyzing the synergy between Marine Biology and Introduction to Inference Statistics, both subjects are on the second academic year of the Biology degree. The first subject needed a statistic support for both the biological hypothesis and the scientific methodology. The last subject often lacks from real world problems, i.e. sampling data in a case of study, manage data, and, finally, analyze data for giving the conclusions.

Then, we propose to make common practices on both subjects, based on the scientific methodology. Educators proposed the scientific goals and the students have to work in groups, sampling the data they needed. Then, in a collaborative way, each group have to introduce its data on an online database. Therefore, all groups can analyze all data based on their specifics scientific goals.

This methodology can be implemented by using a virtual portfolio. The main benefit is that all documents can be managed in this portfolio, and the assessment of all students can be done with the support of the virtual portfolio.
However, main issues that must be solved in this stage are: the collaborative editing tasks, the version control, and backup and security issues.

The implementation of the virtual portfolio using the Google Apps is the main contribution of this work. Here, we describe main aspects of this implementation, as well as the main benefit and the issues that must be solved previously.