Development of an interactive tool based on Education ERPs Software to support the learning of Transversal Competences

According to the current tendencies in University education strategies, students should develop not just the specific competences related to the particular degree they pursue, but also a series of transversal competences (TCs, also called key competences). Such TCs may be transferable between different contexts (personal, social, academic, etc.) while help students to solve problems from different perspectives and so, they would provide students with a holistic education and training. In this framework, the authors present in this paper a tool they have designed for the systematic analysis and evaluation of TCs so as to support students in the achievement of such competences. Moreover, the tool is able to help students to choose the courses that may help them to work out and complement the competences they may not be developed yet, as well as it suggests the most appropriate post-graduate courses for the students according to their background, particular interests and degree of development for the different TCs. The tool has been designed under the scope of vertical ERP systems, which have demonstrated their ability to create collaborative and learning environments with multiple communication functionalities between professors and students. Thus, the tool has been thought as an interactive framework that includes different indexes to monitor the level of development of the diverse TCs, so that it may be accessible to both professors and students during their entire academic life. The tools have been tested within the program of Transversal Competences of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, specifically to the Degree of Energy Engineering.


Introduction
In the framework of the current education strategies at the University level, students should develop a sort of transversal competences (TCs), which in addition to the specific competences related to the particular degree they study, provide students with a holistic education and training (Villa & Poblete, 2007). In the case of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, 13 TCs have been identified and, consequently, they are taught and worked out with students in the different undergraduate and graduate courses (Bonet Espinosa, Cabredo Fagrés, Calvet Sanz, de Andrés Martínez, & Soto Pacheco, 2015).Previous research developed by the authors has evidenced the need for support tools to help students to take decisions related to the courses they should choose to better complement their training and development of TCs (Montuori, Alcázar-Ortega, Vargas-Salgado, & Bastida-Molina, 2019). Therefore, such tools may guide students when choosing the most appropriate postgraduate courses so as to complement their career according to their academic and professional interests.
The tool here presented has been designed according to the Education ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning) principles. ERP systems allow organizations to integrate the different operations and departments for a more efficient management of information and resources (Antonegi Martínez, Casadesús Fa, & Zamanillo Elguezábal, 2005). In particular, an ERP system specifically designed for University education means an essential support for the management of the different areas involved in such activities as research, academics or economics (Cloud Factory, S.L., 2019) due to the different managerial functionalities that it includes (Educacion 3.0, 2018). One of the objectives of the tool here presented is to enhance the active and auto-regulated learning done by the students, which has been also experimented by some researchers at the High School level (Demkanin & Kovác, 2018). In fact, the student is the actual responsible for its own learning process, that should not be limited to listen to the professor (Oltra Mestre, García Palao, Flor Peris, & Boronat Navarro, 2012). This tool has been thought as a module that may be included in the platform Poliformat, which is already linked to the database where all the information related to the TCs evaluation for the graduate and undergraduate students is stored. On the other hand, Poliformat is a well-known environment which professors and students are used to. This fact would facilitate the implementation of the aforementioned tool as a complement of such platform. This paper is organized as follows: Chapter 2 is devoted to present the methodology based on which the tool here presented has been developed. Following, a case of application is presented in Chapter 3, where the tool has been applied to the evaluation of undergraduate students enrolled in the Degree of Energy Engineering that is taught at the High School for Industrial Engineering at UPV. Finally, according to the obtained results, conclusions of this research are discussed and presented in Chapter 4.

Methodology
The proposed tool has been designed according to the methodology proposed by the authors in (Montuori, Alcázar-Ortega, Vargas-Salgado, & Bastida-Molina, 2019) which, including some updates and improvements, may be summarized in the following steps: 1) Analysis of transversal competences and weighting. The first step will be the identification of transversal competences that are worked out in each of the studied courses during the considered undergraduate or graduate degree. Once identified, each competence will be weighted according to the number of credits devoted to its development during the degree, according to the following expression: Where W i CT is the weight of transversal competence i related to the total number of credits that are assigned to the degree; ECTS n is the number of credits for each course n in which the transversal competence i is worked out; and ECTS m is the number of credits for each m course within the degree. 2) Analysis of optative courses. As one of the objectives of the tool is the support to students about the optative courses they may enroll in, the TCs that are worked out in each optative course related to the considered degree will be identified. 3) Definition of development thresholds and corrective actions. TCs are evaluated at UPV according to rubrics, which adopt a qualitative scale (A, B, C or D). In order to quantify the degree of development for each TC, the numerical scale included in Table  1 will be applied. In the proposed methodology, it has been considered that levels C or D mean a nonappropriate development of the considered TC, so that corrective actions need to be applied. An example of such actions, based on the official rubrics developed by UPV for the TCs evaluation (Bonet Espinosa, Cabredo Fagrés, Calvet Sanz, de Andrés Martínez, & Soto Pacheco, 2015) and which should be automatically proposed by the tool, is included in Table 2.

GR ECTS C ECTS
(2) GR n is the degree of development achieved in the course n for the TC i, according to the values indicated in Table 1; and ECTS n is the number of credits of each n course in which the TC i is worked out. b. Technical Interest Factor (I k tec ). It measures the how interesting each k optative course to be chosen by the student is. This factor is self-assigned by the student according to the Likert scale proposed in Table 3: c. Technological Affinity factor (I k tec ). It indicates the affinity of students on the more appropriate optative courses they may enroll in according to their profile, background and personal interest, as well as by the level of development of the related TCs that the student has achieved. This index is calculated as follows: where the variables are those defined above and N k TC is the number of TCs worked out in the optative course k.

Development of an interactive tool based on Education ERPs Software to support the learning of Transversal Competences
Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València 6) Analysis of results and feedback to students. Once the aforementioned factors have been calculated, the last step will be the interpretation of the obtained values and the feedback of recommendations to students, in line with the obtained results. An example application for such kind of analysis is presented in next section.

Application and results
The proposed method will be now applied to a fictitious "typical student" that is enrolled in the fourth course of the Degree in Energy Engineering at UPV. Fig. 1 shows the evaluation of TCs that will be used as basic case, whose assignation has been randomly done for a student that should decide the optative courses to be chosen for the 2 nd semester of the fourth academic year. Each course has been identified by a code, according to the standard classification of UPV 1 . Grades A, B, C and D for each TC have been painted in blue, green, orange and red, respectively.

Conclusions
A novel ERP based tool to support students to better develop their transversal competences is presented in this paper. This tool would assist students in the election of optative courses to further develop the transversal competences they acquire when pursuing their degree, as well as to monitor the level of development of such competences during their whole career. This tool may also help students to choose the most appropriate postgraduate degree according to their academic and professional interests. The tool may allow students to introduce their preferences on which competences they would like to further develop in order to complement their CV. Thus, related to that, they would receive automatic suggestions on how to get this goal. In the case of UPV, this tool could be integrated in the platform Poliformat since it is an environment at which professors and students are used to.