Designing practical activities for skills development

Abstract

The integration of theory and practice, together with the development of academic skills becomes an important educational objective. The case teaching method makes the participants integrate concepts and apply their proficiency to the solution of a real-life problem with the progression of their personal skills such as communication, discussion, active listening, etc. In conjunction, the numerous publications on the case-method reveal several problems when it is applied with early years undergraduate students. This paper describes our experience in adapting the case-method to teach business strategy to an earlier year undergraduate student undertaking a degree in business administration. The activity has been traced following the protocol defined for designing learning activity by the Instituto de Ciencias Educativas (ICE) of the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV).