Home // International Journal On Advances in Life Sciences, volume 1, number 4, 2009 // View article

Improving Cross-Curricular Skills in Web Services: Virtual vs. Attendance Environments

Authors:
Guadalupe Ortiz

Keywords: Virtual Environments; Attendance Environments; Web Services; Teaching Experience; Cross-Curricular Skills.

Abstract:
Web services is a mainly practical software engineering subject which is followed by Computer Science and Telecommunication Engineering students at the University of Extremadura. It is an advanced topic and therefore it is taught in the last years of the engineering, in which the student already has the capacity of learning a lot of concepts by themselves. Although the transmission of the main theoretical and practical concepts of the subject in question must remain the main focus, the improvement of students’ general skills claims for special attention with a view to business requirements. Besides, the mobility of teachers and students among European universities has increased notably, which is a very positive experience for both communities. In this regard, new educational alternatives have to be found for this purpose, not only to provide the possibility of studying a subject abroad, but also to improve cross-curricular skills. It is also a reality to be taken into account that an increasing number of students are already working in the industry while following up their studies. E-learning environments are the perfect answer to these requirements, where a varied range of activities and methodologies can be used to follow the subject virtually as well as promote general cross-curricular skills such as addressing an audience, team work and preparing documentation. In this sense this paper describes the author’s experiences with e-learning environments in the situations described above and compares them with previous experiences in which only attendance lectures where available for students.

Pages: 110 to 121

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2009. Used with permission.

Publication date: March 17, 2010

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2660