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.

Detection and mapping of burnt areas from time series of MODIS-derived NDVI data in a Mediterranean region

Moderate resolution remote sensing data, as provided by MODIS, can be used to detect and map active or past wildfires from daily records of suitable combinations of reflectance bands. The objective of the present work was to develop and test simple algorithms and variations for automatic or semiautomatic detection of burnt areas from time series data of MODIS biweekly vegetation indices for a Mediterranean region. MODIS-derived NDVI 250m time series data for the Valencia region, East Spain, were subjected to a two-step process for the detection of candidate burnt areas, and the results compared with available fire event records from the Valencia Regional Government. For each pixel and date in the data series, a model was fitted to both the previous and posterior time series data. Combining drops between two consecutive points and 1-year average drops, we used discrepancies or jumps between the pre and post models to identify seed pixels, and then delimitated fire scars for each potential wildfire using an extension algorithm from the seed pixels. The resulting maps of the detected burnt areas showed a very good agreement with the perimeters registered in the database of fire records used as reference. Overall accuracies and indices of agreement were very high, and omission and commission errors were similar or lower than in previous studies that used automatic or semiautomatic fire scar detection based on remote sensing. This supports the effectiveness of the method for detecting and mapping burnt areas in the Mediterranean region.

Teaching-learning process of historical heritage: a Journey as a beginning, path and end

The implantation of new university degrees within the European Higher Education Area implies the need of innovative methodologies in teaching and learning to improve the skills and competencies of students and to answer the growing needs that society continuously demands to heritage management experts. The present work shows an application of the teaching methodology proposed during the international workshop entitled “I International Planning Preservation Workshop. Learning from Al Andalus”, which included the participation of the University of Alicante and Granada, Università Politecnico di Milano and Hunter College City University of New York; where we tried to dissolve traditional boundaries derived of interuniversity cooperation programs. The main objective of the workshop was to discuss and debate the role of urban Historical Centers within the Global Heritage by the integrated work through multidisciplinary teams and the creation of a permanent international working group between these universities to both teach and research. The methodology of this workshop was very participatory and considered the idea of a new learning process generated by "a journey experience." A trip from global to local (from the big city to the small village) but also a trip from the local (historical) part of a big city to the global dimension of contemporary historical villages identified by the students through a system of exhibition panels in affinity groups, specific projects proposed by lecturers and teachers or the generation of publications in various areas (texts, photographs, videos, etc.). So, the participation of the students in this multidisciplinary meeting has enhanced their capacity for self-criticism in several disciplines and has promoted their ability to perform learning and research strategies in an autonomous way. As a result, it has been established a permanent international work structure for the development of projects of the Historical City. This relationship has generated the publication of several books whose contents have reflected the conclusions developed in the workshop and several teaching proposals shared between those institutions. All these aspects have generated a new way of understanding the teaching process through a journey, in order to study the representative role of university in the historical heritage and to make students (from planning, heritage management, architecture, geography, sociology, history or engineering areas) be compromised on searching strategies for sustainable development in the Contemporary City.

Evaluation of the quality of the teaching-learning process in undergraduate courses in Nursing

Objective: to identify aspects of improvement of the quality of the teaching-learning process through the analysis of tools that evaluated the acquisition of skills by undergraduate students of Nursing. Method: prospective longitudinal study conducted in a population of 60 second-year Nursing students based on registration data, from which quality indicators that evaluate the acquisition of skills were obtained, with descriptive and inferential analysis. Results: nine items were identified and nine learning activities included in the assessment tools that did not reach the established quality indicators (p<0.05). There are statistically significant differences depending on the hospital and clinical practices unit (p<0.05). Conclusion: the analysis of the evaluation tools used in the article "Nursing Care in Welfare Processes" of the analyzed university undergraduate course enabled the detection of the areas for improvement in the teaching-learning process. The challenge of education in nursing is to reach the best clinical research and educational results, in order to provide improvements to the quality of education and health care.