USE OF PORTFOLIO METHODOLOGY IN BUSINESS COMPUTING LEARNING FOR ECONOMIST
M.E. García-Ruíz, N. González-Fernández
Universidad de Cantabria (SPAIN)
With the inclusion of Spanish University System in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), Spanish universities must adapt theirs structures and systems to this new environment requirements.
The new system brings several changes:
· From magisterial lessons given in big classrooms with several dozens of students we must change to practical lessons.
· From big classrooms with a teacher speaking to small classrooms with information technologies.
· From theorical lessons to practical sessions.
· From concepts’ transmission to information searching tools teaching.
Faced with this situation, the University of Cantabria has begun the adaptation of their degrees and their teachers to the new educational environment, gradually through the implementation of pilot schemes in certain degrees.
This pilot scheme involves the progressive implementation from the first levels of EHEA learning methods, encouraging both students and teachers to enter the new system.
This work illustrates the beginning of the implementation experience of EHEA methodologies in the Business Computer Science subject. This subject belongs to the EHEA pilot experience in UC Bachelor's degree in Economics.
The application of these new techniques to this subject has the following advantages: On one hand, this is a large practical component subject with needs the support of computer’s classrooms. In the other hand, this is an optional subject with a small number of students so that further facilitate the use of participatory methodologies
This elements – the reduce number of students and the practical approach- took us to decide searching for an innovative learning methodology. We decided to call education experts from our university and select portfolio methodology for our subject. This methodology encourages students to create their own collection of works, projects, papers that shows their learning evolution. This paper shows the subject implementation following Prof. Natalia Gonzalez’s recommendations.