Green education using open educational resources (OER): setting up a green OER repository

A wealth of open educational resources (OER) focused on green topics is currently available through a variety of sources, including learning portals, digital repositories and web sites. However, in most cases these resources are not easily accessible and retrievable, while additional issues further complicate this issue. This paper presents an overview of a number of portals hosting OER, as well as a number of “green” thematic portals that provide access to green OER. It also discusses the case of a new collection that aims to support and populate existing green collections and learning portals respectively, providing information on aspects such as quality assurance/collection and curation policies, workflow and tools for both the content and metadata records that apply to the collection. Two case studies of the integration of this new collection to existing learning portals are also presented.

Assessment of University External Internships. Towards a Mixed Model for Measuring the Acquisition of Skills and the Satisfaction of Parties Involved

The continuous improvement of management and assessment processes for curricular external internships has led a group of university teachers specialised in this area to develop a mixed model of measurement that combines the verification of skill acquisition by those students choosing external internships with the satisfaction of the parties involved in that process. They included academics, educational tutors of companies and organisations and administration and services personnel in the latter category. The experience, developed within University of Alicante, has been carried out in the degrees of Business Administration and Management, Business Studies, Economics, Advertising and Public Relations, Sociology and Social Work, all part of the Faculty of Economics and Business. By designing and managing closed standardised interviews and other research tools, validated outside the centre, a system of continuous improvement and quality assurance has been created, clearly contributing to the gradual increase in the number of students with internships in this Faculty, as well as to the improvement in satisfaction, efficiency and efficacy indicators at a global level. As this experience of educational innovation has shown, the acquisition of curricular knowledge, skills, abilities and competences by the students is directly correlated with the satisfaction of those parties involved in a process that takes the student beyond the physical borders of a university campus. Ensuring the latter is a task made easier by the implementation of a mixed assessment method, combining continuous and final assessment, and characterised by its rigorousness and simple management. This report presents that model, subject in turn to a persistent and continuous control, a model all parties involved in the external internships are taking part of. Its short-term results imply an increase, estimated at 15% for the last course, in the number of students choosing curricular internships and, for the medium and long-term, a major interweaving between the academic world and its social and productive environment, both in the business and institutional areas. The potentiality of this assessment model does not lie only in the quality of its measurement tools, but also in the effects from its use in the various groups and in the actions that are carried out as a result of its implementation and which, without any doubt and as it is shown below, are the real guarantee of a continuous improvement.

Coordinación y seguimiento del Grado en Ingeniería Informática

El fomento de la calidad universitaria es una dimensión clave en el EEES que se basa en sistemas de garantía y mejora de la calidad internos en las universidades y en procedimientos llevados a cabo por agencias de evaluación y acreditación externas a ellas. Además, se resalta que cada vez es más necesario que estas acreditaciones de calidad nacionales se reconozcan fuera del propio país. En este contexto ha surgido la creación de sellos de calidad europeos que están enfocados a determinados sectores científico-técnicos o profesionales que tienen la ventaja de facilitar la comparación transfronteriza y ofrecer a universidades y egresados la posibilidad de demostrar la calidad de sus titulaciones en el ámbito europeo. En el caso de los Grados en Ingeniería Informática es el sello EURO-INF regulado por la European Quality Assurance Network for Informatics Education (EQANIE) el que garantiza que la calidad de los programas en informática se corresponde con los criterios europeos genéricos establecidos y que sus egresados adquieren las competencias definidas para este sello. En esta memoria se explica el trabajo realizado para el proceso de acreditación y solicitud del sello EURO-INF como un doble proceso aprovechando las sinergias entre ambos procedimientos.