FOCUSING ON ICT IN THE EUROPEAN

HIGHER EDUCATION AREA

The Bologna Process and its Implications in the Innovation of the

Teaching-learning Process

Pablo Murta, Marta Arce-Urriza and Jos´e Enrique Armend´ariz-I˜nigo

Universidad P´ublica de Navarra, Campus Arrosad´ıa s/n, 31006 Pamplona, Spain

Keywords:

Computer-based training, Web-based learning, Web-based teaching, Cognitive skills, Competency-based ed-

ucation, University, Strategic planning in education, Student-centered learning.

Abstract:

The Bologna Process is one of the milestones of the European Union. All European countries are adapting

their higher education degrees to this new paradigm that pursues a common professional with the same set of

skills across all countries. Its aim is to generate one of the most competitive economies in the world based on

knowledge and assuring its sustainability. On the other hand, ICT is one of the cornerstones of this type of

economy; thus, it does make sense to consider it as a key factor in higher education. In this paper, we relate

the Bologna Process to the usage of ICT in universities focusing on the case of Spain. In particular, we give a

brief overview of the preliminary usage of Sakai in our University.

1 INTRODUCTION

The increasing usage of the Information and Commu-

nication Technologies (ICT) in the learning process

and its application in the cognitive and metacogni-

tive processes brings up the following question: how

will the upcoming European Higher Education Area

(EHEA) will effectively take advantage from ICT?

In 1999 there was a commitment of all European

ministers of Education to improve the competitive-

ness of university education. It was formalized as

EHEA; although it is broadly known as the “Bologna

Process” (BP). BP is aimed to develop a set of com-

mon skills across all degrees. These skills must let

students face the challenges of a global and competi-

tive job market.

BP tries to unify the plethora of different edu-

cational programs into a single European University

valid across all European countries. To do so, each

course from every degree is measured in terms of Eu-

ropean Credit Transfer System (ECTS) units. The

main purpose of BP is that students will switch from

a model relying on the reception of knowledge from

the professor to a new one based on the development

of skills.

BP leads to an innovation in the teaching process

(contents and didactic methodology) and the learning

methodology (processes, skills and strategies). Pro-

fessor will no longer be the exclusive knowledge

holder and the students will not act as merely re-

ceivers of that knowledge. This new education

paradigm implies that students must take the leading

role in the learning process: they must state questions,

generate new information and contribute to a general

consensus in the activities to be accomplished.

Despite some European countries have set the

length of each degree to 180 ECTS the length of each

degree by some European countries, the Spanish au-

thorities have set them to 240 ECTS (equivalent to a

4 year degree). The reason is twofold: it satisﬁes BP;

and, it also merges with other University systems of

great concern to Spain such as USA, South America,

Asia, etc.

ICT are currently being used simply as another

learning tool (Caeiro et al., 2004). However, the new

University system demanded by BP requires that ICT

changes its current use to a leading one since ICT pro-

vides an effective, ﬂexible, accessible and attractive

way of learning. The rest of the work is divided into

the following sections: Section 2 is devoted to explain

the state of art with regard to BP and the adoption of

ICT in the teaching and learning process. Some pre-

liminary results of a new ICT tool being used in our

University are shown and discussed in Section 3. Fi-

135

Murta P., Arce-Urriza M. and Enrique Armendáriz-Iñigo J..

FOCUSING ON ICT IN THE EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION AREA - The Bologna Process and its Implications in the Innovation of the

Teaching-learning Process.

DOI: 10.5220/0003276101350138

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2011), pages 135-138

ISBN: 978-989-8425-50-8

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

nally, conclusions end the paper.

2 STATE OF THE ART

To fulﬁll the requirements that society asks for edu-

cation and professional skills, the European Council

proposed BP. It is founded in a strategy at three dif-

ferent levels (individual, social and academic). These

three levels derived into three strategic goals that

aim to a worldwide leading educational system: en-

hance the quality and efﬁciency of the educational

system; ease the global access of individuals to the

educational system; and, make the educational sys-

tem worldwide accessible.

Actually, BP states this change from a passive

learning model, where there is a knowledge holder

and transmitter (professor) and a receiver (student),

to a new one based on self skills acquisition. This

represents both a challenge for higher education insti-

tutions and a chance for innovation and international-

ization.

Some of the most sensitive factors regarding to

students’ performance are (Carnoy, 2004): (i) labor

situation; (ii) dedication and motivation to their stud-

ies; (iii) scholarships; (iv) prerequisites to access in

the University degree; (v) previous degrees; and, (vi)

grades in the last semester. According to (Carnoy,

2004), the advent of ICT means an enormous poten-

tial of change in higher education institutions. Nev-

ertheless, several analysts consider that the changes

accomplished have been scarce compared to what ex-

pected. One of the factors that limit the usage of ICT

in the teaching process of higher education is that they

may imply changes and transformationsat all levelsin

the didactic process (Salinas, 2004).

The literature, apart from introducing ICT tools

and results, presents the steps needed for the ICT im-

plementation process in education. Regarding to ICT

usage, we can ﬁnd a plethora of applications and tools

that bring to professors and students the chance to

interact and exchange tasks. One of these tools is

SAKAI that has been used in higher education in-

stitutions such as: University of Michigan; Stanford

University; and, the University of North Carolina at

Chapel Hill. In (Bercovitz et al., 2009), it is shown

that the results of this tool are quite satisfactory for:

professors; students; and, administration staff. Fi-

nally, there has been an attempt to provide educational

support from the cloud computing environment such

as CourseCloud and CourseRank. They have been

used and developed at Stanford as a course scheduler

tool (Bercovitz et al., 2009; Koutrika et al., 2009).

The variety of this kind of ICT tools grows at the same

speed as its usage by universities worldwide. These

platforms (i) serve as an exchange tool of tasks, data

and support; (ii) ease the relationship between profes-

sors and students as the information ﬂow grows; and,

(iii) enhance the learning process. The adoption of

these new technologies is due to the need in industry

and universities of a proper management of knowl-

edge.

Training enterprise games is another useful and

successful methodology used to train profession-

als (Badia and Garc´ıa, 2006). However, the increas-

ing popularity of ICT has made them loose the in-

ﬂuence in the Collaborative Project-Based Learning

(CPBL) methodology. This didactic methodology or-

ganizes the teaching and learning process in such a

way that the professor proposes the students one or

several real-world cases. Students must them work

cooperatively in groups to seek solutions to the cases.

This way, an active collaborative learning takes place:

students learn to learn and to apply the theory to prac-

tical situations. We can consider CPBL with the help

of ICT as a modern and effective methodology, es-

pecially best suited for BP (Badia and Garc´ıa, 2006).

In fact, there are several European universities whose

syllabus of courses is entirely organized in terms of

CPBL like the University of Aalborg in Denmark and

the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands.

It is also worth mentioning that there are also

some ICT tools developed by the industry that aim

to manage the knowledge. (Salinas, 2004) states that

the innovationteaching process based on ICT consists

in revisiting current process and promoting innova-

tive experiences in the teaching and learning process

at higher education institutions. This process relies

on the ICT as tools that improve teaching, interaction

and content distribution.

According to (Carnoy, 2004) there will be no ef-

fective adoption of an ICT-based teaching and learn-

ing process until some requirements are fulﬁlled like

the cost reduction of hardware and professor training.

This will only occur when a new generation of pro-

fessors, those educated in the context of ICT, enters

into all range of educational institutions. To overcome

this situation current professors should be introduced

to ICT by special training programs so that they can

become comfortable with the new technologies. Pro-

fessor will then be able to cope with the adaption of

their courses to the use of ICT inside the teaching and

learning process.

We do not have to consider the new teaching and

learning process in universities as an isolated island.

We have to bear in mind that this is a continuous evo-

lution from the very ﬁrst steps of the education. For

instance, it is necessary that the teaching and learn-

CSEDU 2011 - 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education

136

ing process at high schools is oriented to acquire the

necessary skills for higher education studies (Belvis-

Pons et al., 2009). Students come to University

with enough theoretical knowledge but lack of skills

such as: oral expression; the exposition and discus-

sion; and, information searching and ﬁltering. Hence,

working on these transversal skills have a close rela-

tion with future success in the university.

In this work we want to test if the availability of

ICT tools in educational institutions imply signiﬁcant

changes in the management of education, the organi-

zation of the work or the way students study. To do so

we use data from our University (UniversidadP

ublica

de Navarra). As we have previously noted, our Uni-

versity is using since June 2009 an implementation of

a SAKAI variant (http://sakaiproject.org) called Mi-

Aulario (https://miaulario.unavarra.es). As times goes

by, we expect to have more data that will let us to per-

form a deep analysis of the results of this tool.

Figure 1: A general overview of the ICT tool (a variant of

SAKAI) usage at our University.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Figure 1 depicts the mean values of ﬁles uploaded and

used in each one of the different centers we have (3

Faculties and 3 Schools); the data was provided by

the institution. The size of the circle determines the

mean of total accesses in each respective Faculty or

School. From Figure 1 we can infer that each cen-

ter uses this tool in a different way, depending on

the usefulness perceived by professors. The Business

and Economics Faculty presents the greatest amount

of accesses (primarily because of a great number of

downloaded ﬁles) that may be related to a greater

number of downloaded ﬁles. On the contrary, the Law

Faculty presents the lowest access ﬁgures (mainly due

to the small number of downloaded ﬁles). The Grad-

uate School for Health Sciences and the Technical

School for Agricultural Engineering share a similar

mean in terms of accesses; however, they differ in

the mean number of downloaded ﬁles. The same can

be applied, though at a lower scale, to the Technical

School for Industrial Engineering and Telecommuni-

cations and the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sci-

ences.

With the exception of the Business and Economics

Faculty, we can state that Technical Schools take

more advantage of the ICT provided by our Univer-

sity than the rest of centers in our University. In

spite of its recent adoption and implementation, we

can asses, based on the same reasonings presented

in (De Pablos-Pons and Villaciervos-Moreno, 2005),

the four obstacles that possibly lead to the little usage

of this ICT tool are: (i) the adoption of ICT is left to

an individual choice instead of a global, corporative

commitment; (ii) lack of knowledge; the majority of

professors do not know the full potential of ICT; (iii)

lack of resources and quality materials that ensures an

ICT based teaching process; and, (iv) the necessity of

the development of an evaluation tool to ensure the

quality.

It is very popular in our University to photocopy

the material displayed in class. This fact along with

the general little motivation of students to search for

information when compared to the traditional way of

teaching can explain the scarce use of this tool.

We claim that the traditional way of teaching,

where the professor is the knowledge owner and stu-

dents are merely listeners, is no longer acceptable. BP

seeks for an autonomous professional, committed and

ready to live in a multicultural society with its own

rules of coexistence. Only with professional of this

kind, we will be able to develop a sustainable, com-

petitive and dynamic economy. This will also bring

an improvement in the quantity and quality of job of-

fers along with a greater social cohesion.

Dealing with changes inside the universities in

Spain, there is a merge of current three to ﬁve years

degree into a single four year degree. This is one of

BP keystones to satisfy the higher education degree

compatibility across the European Union. It is not

only the degree duration that changes but also the syl-

labus of courses. A syllabus is based on acquiring

a certain set of skills by the future graduate student

that will assure his capability to solve all the potential

problems he will ﬁnd is his professional life.

On the other hand, universities pay special at-

tention to the research activity done by the faculty

staff instead of paying attention to the quality of their

teaching activities so as to improve the academic suc-

cess of their students (Belvis-Pons et al., 2009). In

the case of Spanish universities, they are less capable

of performing changes and BP implies a pretty big

change.

The innovation in terms of methodology imposed

FOCUSING ON ICT IN THE EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION AREA - The Bologna Process and its Implications in

the Innovation of the Teaching-learning Process

137

by BP merely consists in a change in the teaching

and learning process. Further, the change will only

be effective if users (students and professors) see a

signiﬁcant value increment for themselves. There-

fore, it must be taken into account the emotional and

psychological effects apart from the social needs of

individuals. The question that may rise up here is

what does ICT have to do with the teaching process?

It has been proved that improves the performance of

students; it is a skill demanded by almost every com-

pany; and, it is a modern tool that is best suited for the

characteristics of the Bologna Process. Besides, the

OECD (OECD, 2001) considers that the integration

of ICT in the teaching process spurs on to a radical

change, the development of transversal skills and ac-

tivities that ﬁts better to real life activities than before.

Following (Carnoy, 2004), this happens because most

of professors do not know how to manage with new

teaching tools or paradigms. It seems that, in gen-

eral, they are not willing to adopt new technologies

in education; in particular, ICT. This last assertion

is also noted in (Carnoy, 2004; Salinas, 2004) where

they claim that professors are not aware of means and

methods needed to ease the teaching and learning pro-

cess; i.e., they are not likely to change the traditional

way of teaching. However, ICT usage is a mean to

increase the performance of schools and universities.

In concrete, we can ﬁnd that ICT acts as a motivator

and a generator of a better learning (OECD, 2001).

The usage of ICT in higher education will be fa-

vored if the government provides means, like the non-

negligible investment in the ICT professors’ training

process and, mainly, if professors change the way they

teach in order to use ICT tools to provide skills to stu-

dents. The usefulness of ICT for teachers comes in

hand with its complexity, dependability and cleanli-

ness in the presentation of contents in the classroom.

The main challenge that arises is that professors may

leave their role as the source of all knowledge and

take the leading role as a guide for students’ self-

knowledge acquisition. For this, an attractive and in-

novative methodology such as the effective usage of

ICT tools is undeniable.

4 CONCLUSIONS

BP, being understood as a convergence plan, in an

ambitious plan due to the importance and meaning

of actions carried out to innovate the way the teach-

ing and learning processes are done. European edu-

cation convergence is planned as a single knowledge

unit that permits its citizens to move and work around

with a set of common skills. This fact constitutes one

of the strongest points to pursue this change and to

adopt ICT as the main tool for its development. The

adoption of ICT in higher education will depend on

the joint effort of all people involved. The most no-

tably role modiﬁcation is on the professors’ side as

they will become guiders in the learning process.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been supported by the Spanish Govern-

ment under research grant TIN2009-14460-C03-02.

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