The changing European learning environment

The New Bologna Environment pushes us to engaging new ways of teaching. Promoting the participation and commitment of students in their learning process is a key factor for the XXI Century University. Active methodologies should be used to accomplish that. In other words, the key for active learning is to proposing activities that make the students work on their own, looking for the achievement of high objectives.
A key factor for the successful application of active methodologies is that students receive as much feedback from the lecturer as possible; that way students can modify and improve their learning process continuously. As a result, these methodologies are highly time–consuming for lecturers and face an important resistance to change within Academia.

But technology can help us to organize the work and the communication with students. Tools that make the mechanical work associated with the management of students, their papers and their continuous evaluation, improve the efficiency of the time spent by lecturers.

Some e-learning platforms are very useful to the management of the communication with students. For example, lecturers can see statistics of the participation of a particular student in a forum, or listing the mails sent from a student and the responses given to him. But there are other tasks that are not implemented in any software yet.

Developing tools that simplify the hard mechanical work associated to the application of a certain methodology, is key to success in the Bologna process if class groups are not being reduced.

In addition, next generation e-books are being defined at present. As methodology, contents (e-books, technical notes…) have to be flexible enough in order to get our goal. Each student has his own personal resources so the contents have to be that flexible in the sequencing. Two different students may sequence contents differently.

Lecturers will have the possibility to interact within the material to orient each student in a specific direction. In this way, learning is an active process that may change as a function of the different actors that can play a role on it. Contents within text books cannot be static but count on different types of contents. (technical notes, workgroups or deliverables). And the learning strategy applied in each case should be oriented to develop in the students certain specific skills. These specific skills will vary depending on the degree the students are in.

New evaluation strategies: Classmate Peer Evaluation

The New Bologna Environment pushes us to engaging new ways of teaching. Promoting the participation and commitment of students in their learning process is a key factor for the XXI Century University. Active methodologies should be used to accomplish that.

We would like to analyze in this blog different active learning methodologies that can be applied to engineering education, and also how technology may help apply such methodologies easily.

The key for active learning is to proposing activities that make the students work on their own, looking for the accomplishment of high objectives.

A key factor for the successful application of active methdologies is that students receive as much feedback from the professor as possible; that way students can modify and improve their learning process continuously.

To provide this feedback several actions may be taken, which can be classified in two main groups:

1. Actions based on discussions. Discussions generated about a subject, project or problem (and activities that promote them, both in the classroom or on-line), help the students work out their own knowledge based on the information received, and also on their previous experience.

2. Actions based on evaluation. Both self-evaluation and classmate-peer evaluation are a straight way to improve the personal capability of the students to review their own personal work and to think about a better way to accomplish the objectives established by the professor.

To begin with, we will focus on the second group (classmate-peer evaluation). Classmate-peer evaluation allows tracking the performance of the student on a continuous basis. In addition, students learn how to evaluate and the final result is a better capacity of self-evaluation.

Classmate-peer evaluation is usually limited to a small group of students. For instance, the students are divided in groups of four, and are asked to make a collaborative work (e.g. report on a subject, laboratory practical work...). Each one of the members of the group evaluates the other three. Notice that, at first, the evaluations may not be accurate. For that reason, the professor should find a non time-consuming way to check them.

The way to do this is to provide the students with the guide for evaluating the work of their peers in the group. That guide should be given at the beginning of the semester. The guide should focus on the aspects the professor considers the most important.

Furthermore, the effectiveness of peer evaluation depends strongly on ensuring proper feedback on a timely basis. Professors should provide this feedback accurately and properly but, as the number of student increases, this timely feedback becomes more and more cumbersome.

In order to cope with that difficulty, information technologies tools can provide some help. We propose the following key functionalities for such a classmate-peer evaluation tool.


1. Students fill an electronic form with the evaluation of their peers.

2. All the evaluations are saved in a database and are identified both with the name of the student being reviewed and with the name of the reviewer.

3. The tool should compare the evaluations from all the students involved (usually three) in order to validate the goodness of the evaluation itself. If an evaluation is quite different from the others, the tool raises an alarm to the professor, who should review it.

4. The professor reviews the evaluations and marks them as valid or invalid. The system will merge professor’s evaluation with the valid ones.

In this way, peer evaluation is much more effective and less time-consuming, so professors could spend more time giving feedback to their students than evaluating them... which is more profitable.

Learning objects and learning strategies for succesful e-books

We have just read an article in UNIVNOVA, a Spanish newsletter designed as a media to think about University in the future. This article dealt with learning strategies for e-learning and the interaction between these learning strategies and the learning objects. You can view it at http://www.um.es/ead/red/19/esteban_zapata.pdf

It is an article from two Spanish psychology professors in which they make some questions about what the relationship should be between learning strategies and learning objects in an e-learning environment. After reading this article, I was considering useful to think about learning objects and e-text books. Which should be the learning objects a good instructional e-text might have in order to be successful?

Students can use different learning strategies based in their previous personal experience, their previous cognitive resources. This is called metacognition by psychologists (the background you have to approach a learning experience)

Bologna process is oriented to an only goal: “student learning”, so methodology and contents (e-books, technical notes…) have to be flexible enough in order to get this goal. Each student has his own personal resources so the contents have to be flexible enough in the sequencing. Two different students may sequence contents differently.

Contents should have a default sequencing that may be slightly changed by the student. We used “slightly” deliberately. As we are dealing with undergraduate students, we are supposed to give them a specific path, providing they have the possibility to change it. This shouldn’t be so important for postgraduate or life-long learning students.

Contents need a guide of use to support the specific learning strategy related to the area of knowledge. Different learning strategies contribute to achieving different skills in the students. For instance, areas like engineering need learning strategies that promote complex thinking in order to divide complex problems in a sum of more simple ones.
Our proposal is to consider three types of virtual contents for Bologna (technical notes, workgroups and deliverables). These contents should contain different learning objects and be associated to one or various specific learning strategies. The learning strategy adopted should be oriented to develop in the students certain skills an engineer must have.

Thinking about our reflections in the DICE Forum about e-text books, we can state that a successful e-text book has to include a specific learning strategy with a flexible sequencing that professor may select for students. Of course, each e-text book should include several learning objects to achieve our goal.

For example, each chapter of an e-book may have these learning objects:

Basic text
URLs included within the text. They can be links to other sections of the e-book or to internet web pages (similar to wikipedia)
Self-evaluation

The associated learning strategy would be the default sequencing of the e-book.

Please, give us your feedback on e-text books. We are strongly convinced they are going to be an important tool in the future University we are designing today.

Let’s think about e-books and new technologies for learning

We’ve been participating in the DICE-PUFSIG workgroup of the IMS Global Consortium, devoted to the Dynamical Instructional Content Exchange, for almost two months.

The end goal is to define use cases that reflect most of the uses of an advanced e-text book, on a global basis: e-text books can only be successful if they are independent of the underlying technology, and oriented to a mass market, gathered from customers all over the world.

In this effort to accomplish that task we shared some information about the situation of e-books in Spain, which is quite different from that of the United States.

In Spain, there is not a business model for re-buying and re-selling used text books on a large scale basis. Only individuals sell them through internet. As a result, market lacks used books. For that reason, e-books compete directly with new books, although they are not very popular.

Regarding primary and secondary school environment, text books change from year to year, that is, children and teenagers cannot get used books from their brothers. People are used to pay for text books without having any refund, but they complain about high prices. To solve this,Government pays a “book check” to families with low income or more than two children. E-books can improve the learning experience and reduce the prices families invest on education, and also provide much more services for the same price.

At University, students rely on their lecture notes to study, and borrow books from the library. They buy cheap technical notes edited by the University. University libraries have a number of copies of text books as a function of the number of students registered in a particular subject. Students are not used to buy a book per subject and, for this reason, they are not willing to invest money on e-books. Nevertheless they could probably change their minds if e-text books offer a comforting and effective learning experience and learning process improvement.

There are some e-books repositories available for free at public Universities, but statistics of usage are discouraging. This is due partly because of the shortage of books in some subjects and partly because of this e-text books are just plain text ( i.e. you can watch them on your screen, but interactivity does not exist).

The challenge is to define attractive e-text books that give the students new possibilities to improve their learning experience. These e-text books should be interactive, flexible and contents should evolve as faster as possible. All the same, users should have the possibility of improving the content with their comments or suggestions.

Europe is suffering a crisis in its education system. School and College are failing to motivate students. Old methodologies are not working anymore.

Young people are the Web 2.0 generation and if we succeed in adding the Internet 2.0 philosophy to the new e-materials and learning processes, not only would we improve the learning experience but also could find a new way of motivating young people.

Could you share with us your vision about the learning experience in your country? Which capabilities do you think are important for an e-text book to be successful?

Sixth Intangible: The need for gateways to large markets

New businesses need markets to be tested and proved successful. Densely populated areas are a natural laboratory for testing and introducing new ideas cost-effectively [Venkataraman]. Smaller and less densely populated areas have to find a way to overcome the lack of counting on a natural laboratory. In our global world, interconnections are easier to achieve, but they have to be established first. A small area that is willing to enter into a virtuous cycle has to establish bridges to near and further markets all around the world.

The access to external markets depends primarily on the intangible social network infrastructure, more than on the physical one. The quantity, quality and density of the social and economic connections (the ones that business and government leaders of the aspiring region have with the leaders of gateway cities), and their willingness to use it on behalf of the local citizenry will make the difference [Venkataraman].

But, leaders’ capabilities to connect with different regions, depends strongly on the education they have received. If we want our community to develop itself as a cosmopolitan area in the future, some questions have to be addressed at the early University stage. These are actions that have a long-term effect, but we cannot ignore them in the present if we look forward to a future virtuous cycle.

University has a great role in developing horizontal skills in the students such as working in interdisciplinary and international workgroups, or being capable of managing to make good contacts with people from different cultures. In Europe, we have experienced the significance of promoting international relations during the University period in order to make a real European market. Exchange programmes are a strong tool to achieve this goal. Living in another country and developing relations within another culture during the University period is the beginning of feeling like doing international businesses. Apart from the laws that simplify commercial relationships between European countries, the real Europe can only be constructed on the basis of personal and professional connections of people.

When I studied at University, twenty years ago, the working environment was basically nationwide. Nowadays students are used to study at least one year in another European University, so most of them develop this kind of skills. The result is their working environment is Europe and they develop easily personal relationships with other people across the continent.

An area that has to enter in a virtuous cycle, needs educate the new generations in fostering the ability to understand and relate with different cultures. Actions aimed at achieving this goal, will bring in the future the desired gateways to other markets.

And, as a personal reflection, they will bring something far more important: a peaceful world. The more people of the world know each other, the less it is likely to fight for anything.

Fifth intangible: the need of safety nets

Entrepreneurship is an important value that should be developed during the university period. That goal should be undertaken not only for pushing some students to create their own new technology based businesses, but for strengthening certain skills and attitudes in students, who will be entreprising workers in the future.
Companies that trust on entrepreneur directors and enterprising staff are more likely to succeed in today’s globalized world. Indeed, the big difference between the entrepreneurial behaviour and the conservative one is usually the fear for failure, so that, to trust on someone is also to accept that failure is possible and also accept it as a consequence of enterprising character.
It is safer to make things as expected than taking those innovative steps that can change the future of your company. All of us know some example of this in the business world. Only societies in which failure is admitted as a direct consequence of taken risks support the entrepreneur with safety nets; They back entrepreneurs because it is the signal that a person has certain capabilities for innovation.
So that, if a society wishes to progress within a virtuous cycle, it has to establish safety nets that address the inherent failures of entrepreneurship.
How can University education contribute to accomplish this task? University has an important role in the development of the professional skills of young students. Among these skills we can find the capacity to solve a problem based in the acquired knowledge, critical thinking, team-working, self-confidence, and risk capacity. Moreover, education methodologies can foster the students’ skills towards trying new things, no matter the result that can be obtained. The slogan is: take risks, make mistakes. The important question is to showing them the positive side of mistakes, as a natural experience in the learning process. Thomas Edison said: I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. That’s the spirit.
New technologies are very useful in the implementation of these methodologies. Forums and wikipedias are tools to develop creative thinking around a subject. In this case, professors have the responsibility to create the safety net in this academic environment. We shouldn’t look down on the contribution that this type of education can make to society and to empowering the entrepreneurship behaviour in all levels.

Fourth Intangible: The need of region-specific ideas to be created

It has been extensively proved that people values and culture determine their way of thinking and approaching problems. For that reason, multicultural teams are more likely to obtain creative and innovative results that homogeneous ones.

That seems to work in the same way as biological evolution: endogamic behaviors tend to degenerate a species. On the contrary, exogamic behaviors tend to improve next generations.
For the past ten years, multinational companies have been changing their structure from a national based structure (that is, different product lines are assigned to different countries) to a multicultural based one (promoting movements of people between different countries in an attempt to create multicultural teams around a product or subject).
This reveals that each region has a different approach to life based on particular idiosyncratic values, so, we could take advantage of idiosyncratic values in order to develop region-specific ideas.
If entrepreneurship is based in region-specific knowledge, sustainable success is more likely to happen, as new developments will be based in the differential characteristics of that region.
So, it is important to create and support mechanisms that develop region-specific knowledge.
Again, University is in a good position for supporting these mechanisms: University Institutions deal with young people and one of their main functions is to transfer values and knowledge to the society in which they are placed.
To publish professors and students opinions in local mass media is a good way to transfer the entrepreneurship values to society. If entrepreneurship values are referred to region-specific products or characteristics, they will be much more effective to thepurpose of establishing a sustainable entrepreneurship behavior in society