Abstract

The importance of teamwork as a core capacity in the new university curricula is beyond all doubt. It is therefore crucial to know what cooperative learning is and how efficient it is for teams of students that use it. Thus, the aim of this paper is to operationalise the concept of cooperative learning and to study its consequences on both the individual learning of the members of a team and on the overall performance achieved by the team as a whole. Structural equation models were used on a sample of 319 students in a marketing subject at a Spanish public university. The results obtained show that students learn better in subjects in which cooperative learning is applied, and the teams performance also improves. We therefore fully endorse fostering its use in the classroom. Lastly, several new lines of research are proposed to complete current knowledge about cooperative learning.

Abstract

This paper outlines the experience developed in the UNED (Spanish National University of Distance Education) to extend the use of Open Educational Resources for business and management education. UNED joined the European research project OpenScout --which offers value-added tools and services for learners, educators and technology providers- and participated in the design, creation, analysis and evaluation of a model of informal learning. OpenScout draws from a federated reposi tory of educational resources, using and re-using the existing materials and generating new ones, in a creative, collaborative, multilingual international initiative. The cultural adaptation process has been analyzed in the Spanish context. The main strengths of OpenScout, linked to the re-use of open contents in the educational process, are described. In addition, we discuss the project’s capacity for integration into larger virtual communities, seeking synergies from combined use with the most popular social networks.

Abstract

This study examines the transformation of classroom dynamics brought about by the use of tablets for educational purposes. The empirical bases of this study were defined by the “Samsung Smart School” project, which was developed by Samsung and Spain’s Ministry of Education during academic year 2014-15, in which teachers and 5th and 6th year students attending 15 primary schools across several Autonomous Communities in Spain were provided with tablets. The research sample comprised 166 teachers. A qualitative analysis strategy was applied by means of: a) non-participant observation, b) focus groups, c) semi-structured interviews with teachers, and d) content analysis of teaching units. These techniques enabled us to extract and examine six dimensions of teaching (educational objective, teaching approach, organization of content and activities, teaching resources, space and time, and learning assessment). Our findings show that teachers tend to apply a transversal approach when using tablets to work on different competencies, focusing more on activities than on content through the use of apps. They reclaim the act of play as part of the learning process, and tablet use encourages project-based learning. To sum up, this study shows that teachers view tablets not only as a technological challenge, but also as an opportunity to rethink their traditional teaching models.

Abstract

Teamwork is one of the most widespread teaching methods used to achieve learning skills. Despite the difficulty of finding out the degree of individual learning taking place in each member of the group, these methods are having an increasingly greater importance in university teaching. The present article shows the results of an R+D+i1 project aimed at «analysing the impact of eRubrics ?electronic rubrics? on the assessment of university learning in various forms». Likewise, it aims to show the scope of eRubrics in improving cooperative skills, which are achieved through teamwork and cooperative assessment of tasks in the computer lab. The experiment takes place in three groups selected from a total of six groups of students from the First Year of Primary Education Teaching during the 2011-12 academic year. From the three groups, one acted as the control group and the other two as the experimental groups in which eRubrics were used. Differences were found in students’ results in a written test taken by all the groups, as the group using eRubrics achieved better results than the other two. Additionally, a qualitative analysis was conducted, by classifying the answers of students in the control group with regard to the evaluation criteria that they used, in order to check for coincidences with the eRubric criteria used by students in the experimental groups.