La mediación universitaria: un recurso de orientación. Experiencia en la Universidad de Alicante

Este trabajo de investigación parte del concepto de orientación que compartimos con Bisquerra (2008), definiéndola como un proceso de ayuda continuo a todas las personas, en todos los aspectos, con la finalidad de potenciar el desarrollo humano a lo largo de toda la vida. En este marco de referencia caben todas las acciones dirigidas hacia quien necesita y busca apoyo para su crecimiento personal, académico y profesional. En el ámbito universitario, históricamente poco receptivo a este tipo de actuaciones, se vienen generalizando a raíz de las nuevas concepciones metodológicas que exige la convergencia europea conceptos novedosos e innovadores y que avalan la orientación en la Universidad, como tutorización, transición universitaria, o mediación. Y son ya muchas instituciones las que han puesto en marcha organismos y programas de innovación para su desarrollo efectivo. La Universidad de Alicante viene trabajando en estos temas desde hace unos años y una de las experiencias más novedosas la desarrolla la Facultad de Educación, implantando la figura de la mediadora como recurso de resolución de situaciones conflictivas. En el marco de esta innovación nos planteamos abordar qué se entiende por mediación y cuál es su funcionalidad, al tiempo que realizar una reflexión sobre los agentes implicados y las competencias necesarias para su implementación. Ha participado en la investigación un grupo de alumnas solicitantes del recurso y un equipo docente constituido en Red de investigación. De los resultados obtenidos en la búsqueda de delimitación conceptual y funcional, de estrategias de gestión y de propuestas de actuación en el proceso mediador podemos concluir que es un aspecto positivo y necesario que rentabiliza las tareas de gestión universitaria y que soluciona al alumnado situaciones que pueden entorpecer un desarrollo personal y académico adecuado.

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.

A Construction Management Framework for Mass Customisation in Traditional Construction

A Mass Customisation model is discussed as a competitive positioning strategy in the marketplace adding value to the customer’s end-use. It includes the user as part of the construction process responding to the customer’s demands and wishes. To the present day, almost all proposals for Mass Customisation have been focused on the design phase and single family houses. The reality is that the processes carried out in the work execution are so inefficient that the costs of the Mass Customisation models are assumed by the customer and they do not offer solutions that support the change management. Furthermore, this inefficiency often makes Mass Customisation unfeasible in terms of deadlines and site management. Therefore, the present proposal focuses on achieving the paradigm of Mass Customisation in the traditional residential construction complementary to the existing proposals in the design phase. All this through the proposal of a framework for the integral management in the work execution, which will address change management introduced by the users offering an efficient and productive model that reduces costs in the process. This model will focus on the synergy between different strategies, techniques and technologies currently used in the construction management (such as Lean Construction or Six Sigma), together with, other strategies and technologies that have proven to be valid solutions in other fields (such as Business Process Management, Service Oriented Architecture, etc.).

Conceptual Modelling of Complex Network Management Systems

Society, as we know it today, is completely dependent on computer networks, Internet and distributed systems, which place at our disposal the necessary services to perform our daily tasks. Moreover, and unconsciously, all services and distributed systems require network management systems. These systems allow us to, in general, maintain, manage, configure, scale, adapt, modify, edit, protect or improve the main distributed systems. Their role is secondary and is unknown and transparent to the users. They provide the necessary support to maintain the distributed systems whose services we use every day. If we don’t consider network management systems during the development stage of main distributed systems, then there could be serious consequences or even total failures in the development of the distributed systems. It is necessary, therefore, to consider the management of the systems within the design of distributed systems and systematize their conception to minimize the impact of the management of networks within the project of distributed systems. In this paper, we present a formalization method of the conceptual modelling for design of a network management system through the use of formal modelling tools, thus allowing from the definition of processes to identify those responsible for these. Finally we will propose a use case to design a conceptual model intrusion detection system in network.

Management of social networks in the educational process

The research developed in this work consists in proposing a set of techniques for management of social networks and their integration into the educational process. The proposals made are based on assumptions that have been proven with simple examples in a real scenario of university teaching. The results show that social networks have more capacity to spread information than educational web platforms. Moreover, educational social networks are developed in a context of freedom of expression intrinsically linked to Internet freedom. In that context, users can write opinions or comments which are not liked by the staff of schools. However, this feature can be exploited to enrich the educational process and improve the quality of their achievement. The network has covered needs and created new ones. So, the figure of the Community Manager is proposed as agent in educational context for monitoring network and aims to channel the opinions and to provide a rapid response to an academic problem.

Implementation Feasibility of a Digital Nervous System for the Construction Industry: For Efficient and Effective Information Management across the Project Lifecycle

The construction industry has long been considered as highly fragmented and non-collaborative industry. This fragmentation sprouted from complex and unstructured traditional coordination processes and information exchanges amongst all parties involved in a construction project. This nature coupled with risk and uncertainty has pushed clients and their supply chain to search for new ways of improving their business process to deliver better quality and high performing product. This research will closely investigate the need to implement a Digital Nervous System (DNS), analogous to a biological nervous system, on the flow and management of digital information across the project lifecycle. This will be through direct examination of the key processes and information produced in a construction project and how a DNS can provide a well-integrated flow of digital information throughout the project lifecycle. This research will also investigate how a DNS can create a tight digital feedback loop that enables the organisation to sense, react and adapt to changing project conditions. A Digital Nervous System is a digital infrastructure that provides a well-integrated flow of digital information to the right part of the organisation at the right time. It provides the organisation with the relevant and up-to-date information it needs, for critical project issues, to aid in near real-time decision-making. Previous literature review and survey questionnaires were used in this research to collect and analyse data about information management problems of the industry – e.g. disruption and discontinuity of digital information flow due to interoperability issues, disintegration/fragmentation of the adopted digital solutions and paper-based transactions. Results analysis revealed efficient and effective information management requires the creation and implementation of a DNS.