Collaborative learning has a long tradition within higher education. However, its application in classes with a large number of students is complicated, since it is a teaching method that requires a high level of participation from the students and careful monitoring of the process by the educator. This article presents an experience in collaborative learning adapted to large class sizes using wikis. The objective is to check if wikis allow for effective collaborative learning methods to be introduced into large groups. The results show how effective wikis can be in encouraging collaborative learning and active participation by the student, as well as facilitating the monitoring and assessment of individual work even in large classes.
The economic importance of sheep farming is somewhat reduced from a macroeconomic point of view and only makes up a small part of agrarian income and employment. The quantitative macroeconomic evidence shows that the activity of traditional sheep farming is not profitable enough, while the trends seem to be moving toward a reduction in the number of farms, in their concentration and in their intensification. The paper presents the research results with the focus on voactional motiations of farmer.
This article identifies the factors that indicate the opportunity of reviewing the methods in teaching economics in order to overcome the traditional teaching-learning scheme that overvalues rote learning and find formulas that facilitate the development of analytical skills. On the other hand, this work points out the importance of developing creative competences. One way to do this is to introduce artistic practices in the classroom, even in non-artistic subjects. In this work an experience of education based on the arts is presented. Thanks to smartphone cameras, students can share and project drawings in the classroom immediately to facilitate group learning. The proposal is to represent the economic problems of the third world through drawings made by students of Sociology at the University of Va-lencia (Spain). The experience shows positive results in terms of students' engagement and creativity development.
We propose that contemporary art, which reflects the problems and attitudes of our times, can be used as a way of promoting creativity in disciplines that are not traditionally associated with the arts. Whilst contemporary art is being used as a learning and teaching aid in higher education in a small number of disciplines, it is not normally used in disciplines dominated by rational discourse; an example is economics, on which we focus. We begin by reviewing the literature on art, education and creativity. We then perform an activity with students taking political economy. Students are given the task of selecting a work of contemporary art which "speaks" to them about political economy, followed by an assessed, in-class presentation on the connection between the piece of art and the subject of political economy. We run a focus group to assess the effectiveness of the activity in terms of encouraging the students to exercise and develop their creativity. We find that it is particularly effective at enabling them to establish innovative connections and associations, increasing their interest in learning and developing a personally relevant body of knowledge. Furthermore, taking into consideration contemporary art's ability to highlight the problems of our times and to react to them, we consider whether the works presented by the students display these problems and are capable of offering solutions, or elements of solutions, to them, and find that they are indeed capable of doing so.
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