Abstract
Higher education institutions must enable students to acquire skills and capacities that prepare them for working life and enhance their employability. This will lead to an applied learning- and teaching-enhancement-oriented sustainable Higher Education System. This research aims to contribute to that goal by analyzing student interactions in a collaborative learning community. It assesses the impact of visual tools on academic performance and student satisfaction in employment-focused blended studies, in which enrollees were geographically dispersed undergraduates with a diversity of profiles. A financial studies learning community was created to test students’ interactions in a model conducive to participation as visual content creators and users. Three surveys (pre-project, appraisal of classmates’ visual exercises, and post-project) were conducted to assess project impact. First, we used a univariate approach, focused on students’ characteristics, course and project appraisals, and the effects of the project on academic performance and expectations. Secondly, a bivariate approach was conducted to detect relationships between respondents’ appraisals and personal characteristics and to determine whether their mean scores were the same irrespective of such characteristics. The findings showed that: (1) Students’ preferences concur with those of their employers; (2) participation in innovative initiatives improves students’ perception of course procedures; (3) visual tools have a positive impact on learning, in terms of both academic performance and student satisfaction. The study concludes by providing support for educational institutions´ decision-making around courses and the overall curricula by defining the factors determining academic performance and student satisfaction.
Highlights
Interdisciplinary vision and teamwork are imperative to the agility, flexibility, and innovation that are so essential in today’s corporate culture [1]
The initial assumptions adopted in this study, conducted in the context of the UNED’s Visual-Thinking-Mediated Innovation and Creativity project, were: (1) Visual tools stimulate creativity and adapt learning mechanisms to mind function [46]; (2) students using visual thinking (VT) techniques understand financial course content more readily, according to findings by Messina et al [67]; (3) just as students choose the learning tools best adapted to their characteristics and needs, the choice of VT tools should likewise be voluntary; (4) partnering yields good academic results, motivates students to work in groups, and affords greater satisfaction than traditional individualized study
Furtherance by higher education institutions of measures in line with labor market demands enables students to acquire skills and capacities that prepare them for working life and enhance their employability, in line with what was expressed by Laguna-Sánchez et al [71]
Summary
Interdisciplinary vision and teamwork are imperative to the agility, flexibility, and innovation that are so essential in today’s corporate culture [1]. Management, and organizational creativity is vital to respond nimbly to problems [2], but to identify opportunities [3], allocate resources efficiently [4], and introduce and captain organizational change [5]. Encouraging creativity is essential and should be furthered in companies, and across the whole education system, so present and future workers can meet labor market needs and demands. A recent survey by the World Economic Forum [6] on the impact of technological change showed that most employers deem “creativity” to be one of the three most demanded skills for 2020. Teamworking is a curriculum imperative, in environments where classmate interaction is close to nil, such as in distance education
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