As of this academic year, some of the courses offered in three of the UOC’s faculties – Economics and Business, Psychology and Education Sciences, and Information and Communication Sciences – will be designed to assess students solely on the basis of their skills. The initiative falls under the umbrella of a pilot project that, for now, will focus on only one programme in each of the three faculties. If the results are positive, however, it will cover them all in following years.
The project c. The University Master’s Degree in Quality Management and Evaluation in Higher Edu onsists of basing course design on skills acquisition for one master’s degree or postgraduate programme in each of these three facultiescation, for instance, has been selected by the Faculty of Psychology and Education Science. Later on, the skills that students must acquire will be determined, as will the criteria for assessing their acquisition. The third step will be the creation of a series of graphs that the University will study to track the achievement level of the established skills. This level will be quantified and also presented to students in the form of graphs or tables. Skills assessed in the Bachelor’s Degree in Communication, for example, include advanced data research and the ability to speak in public or summarize information.
“Apart from the course mark, students will see which specific and transferable skills they are working and improving on, or not, as the term goes by”, explains Lluís Paster, director of the UOC’s eLearn Center, who is at the helm of the project.
“Designing our courses based on skills and assessing their acquisition, serves to further develop our model, which places students at the centre of the education system. Courses will begin to transcend the subject matter they cover”, adds Pastor.
Some universities are progressively unfolding skills-based work in their classrooms. That being said, there are still very few that have incorporated skills acquisition-based assessment, Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia and the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands being two of the few examples. “We don’t have all the information, but we understand that no university has incorporated this throughout its faculties and programmes”, explained the eLearn Center director.
The UOC pilot test will take place this year during the first semester and it will be assessed during the second. If results are positive, the initiative will be applied to more faculties during the 2019/2020 academic year.
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