Concept maps as an instrument of teaching coordination in postgraduate studies

Abstract

In the current European Higher Education Area, teamwork and coordination are essential strategies to improve the quality of teaching, involving awareness of the importance of understanding teaching as a shared responsibility in which teachers and students alike will participate. It is important to establish mechanisms and resources to ensure optimal coordination (intra and inter-material). The Academic Coordination, among other tasks, seeks to ensure that there is no overlap in content between the different subjects, guaranteeing that the range of skills of the degree is covered. In the context of the University Master’s Degree in Training and Sports Performance of the University of León, it has been necessary to optimize the inter- and intra- subject coordination, to avoid overlapping of contents detected in the Tutorial Action Program, in which students participate. To this end, a teaching innovation project is being carried out to introduce a coordination instrument based on concept maps, which would make it possible to visually control and locate the contents of each subject. Professors of each subject have participated in a familiarization session with the instrument that will be shown to students in the first presential session of each subject, contextualizing both the subject and the contents. This instrument will be evaluated by the teaching staff and the students by means of an on-line questionnaire (Google forms), with which feedback will be obtained that will allow the adjustment and evaluation of its usefulness for later courses and other degrees. This study has been developed within the Plan of support for teaching innovation of the University of León (PAID 2019), under the title “ Application of concept maps as an instrument of teaching coordination”