CHALLENGES IN TEACHING OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT AS A RESULT OF FOLLOWING THE EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION AREA GUIDELINES

摘要

The implementation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) involves both a shift in the teaching approaches and a challenge in the definition of professional competences, which mostly depend on the related professional and scientific communities. Spanish universities are developing several actions aimed at adapting their degrees to the European framework. Specifically, Universitat Jaume I (Spain) promoted several pilot projects initiated during 2003-2004 academic year. In one of them, a set of subjects in the last year of the Industrial Engineering degree were re-oriented and traditional teaching strategy modified in order to focus on the accomplishment of the Bologna process guidelines. Operations management is one of the subjects that has been participating in this specific project since then. Basically, the participation in this project caused changes in the scheduling of the subject, which lead us to analyse the methodology used with a different reference framework, and a greater effort in the assessment of the course. In this work we describe those aspects in the design of an operations management course that suffered major reflection as a consequence of its participation in the above project and the outcomes we identified after having applied the new approach for four academic years. Specifically, the information for the assessment of the course design was obtained by three ways: first, we consider the information about the students' workload; second, a survey carried out by the university to evaluate the professors' and their teaching periodically; third, a specific survey for the subject aimed at evaluating the students' improvement in different competences at the end of the lectures period and before knowing their assessment. The results show that the effort done for the planning and development of the course Production Management has improved, according to the students, in several of the professional abilities that the practice of operations management entails, specially the knowledge of the surrounding companies operations and the ability to work in teams and oral communication ability. From the teachers' point of view, the experience also means a change of mentality for the professor since now an estimation of the students' workload and the capacities to be developed have been included. The experience also shows that the student and the professor will need training in many of the basic concepts that this reform is introducing in order to be able to understand the system where the higher education will take place (for instance, competences, didactic unit….). Finally, we would like to mention that we also foresee the need of a major coordination between professors at different levels, for instance those that work in the same term, year and degree.