Flexibility of Curricula at Universitat Jaume I

Abstract

Relating to the new European strategy for Educational so called "Rethinking educational strategy" 1], Europe said: we need a radical rethink on how education and training systems can deliver the skills needed by the labour market. The European Commission is launching a new strategy called Rethinking Education to encourage Member States to take immediate action to ensure that young people develop the skills and competencies needed by the market and to achieve their targets for growth and jobs. In addition to this, Universitat Jaume I (UJI) is interested in the Solar Decathlon competition for 2014 (SDE14). Both reasons encourage UJI to adapt new contents within an existing curriculum, in this case will be environmental and sustainability for social-technical-economical reasons. Rethinking Education calls for a fundamental shift in education, with more focus on 'learning outcomes' - the knowledge, skills and competences that students acquire. Then, it is needed to ensure that education is more relevant to the needs of students and the labour market, assessment methods need to be adapted and modernised. Universitat Jaume I has adapted all curricula to Bologna Declaration in 2010, then no all degrees have been implemented yet. Due to this reason, staffs are not willing to change again degree's descriptors. However, the SDE competition demands to introduce new contents about sustainability issues to improve social responsibility with the environment. At the University the curricula has been organised in ECTS (European Credit Transfer System), where some credits are based of lectures and some based of student hours. Following the UJI internal regulation those hours are assigned as following: 65 % based on student's hours and 35% based on lecturing hours. Moreover, all courses have to have at least 12 credits in practicum with a company and 12 ECTS for a final project. Moreover, students can choose a maximum of 6 credits in extra activities. This means that, at least each curriculum has some credits which are not previously described their content. Following UJI, as a case study, the most suitable curriculum will be analysed and compared to the amount of 30 ECTS without specific contents. Then the first point is to identify the % ECTS to improve it with studies more related to SDE. The analysis process has detected the need of a process approach. It is described how to establish the process and how to develop the process approach. This will help to SDE organisation to control all activities and to collect the knowledge. The conclusions will be based in two focus of interest of this case of study; the first one is to improve the percentage of academic implementation out of a process approach and the second one is to manage the knowledge implementing the process.