Information Technology Reference
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within this area, he or she can choose to be an expert in Recommender Systems, by choosing
artificial intelligence, programming and object oriented databases subjects. So, an Academic
Profile concerns several subjects of each group.
The point is that, to reach this level of specialization in a specific area in which a student is
supposed to be more capable, the student needs to make decisions in order to obtain the
appropriate knowledge and abilities. The more accurate those decisions are the better the
development of the student's potential.
3.2 Academic orientation tasks. Advisors
Students must make hard decisions about the future since early ages despite their
personality and maturity could not be enough to make properly those important decisions.
So that, some educational systems have created a figure to guide the students in their
academic orientation decision making, so-called Advisor.
Without loss of generality we focus on the Spanish Educational System, advisors for
secondary and high schools (other stages are similar).
In Spain the advisor's duties are mainly three:
a. Diversity management
b. Personal attention
c. Academic-professional orientation.
We will focus our paper on the Academic Orientation task. Usually, each advisor deals
yearly with several hundreds of students (between 200 and 500 each year), depending on
the institution. Therefore, with such a number of students where each one has his/her own
personality and skills, the advisor's tasks are really hard to perform successfully for all
students. The development of supporting tools for advisors can then improve the success of
their tasks.
Regarding Academic Orientation, the advisors usually face two main types of students.
Students with no idea about what profile to choose. Advisor should help them to build
their academic profile by choosing modality and subjects.
Students that want to study a profile independently of their skills to acquire such a
specialization. Here, advisors can help students if they are able to identify topics or
subjects in which those students can find difficulties to achieve successful results.
3.3 Competency based education
In a changing world based in changing technology and services, it is necessary for academic
systems to have solid foundations capable of allowing a flexible configuration of learning
process formulated as flexible academic profiles. Zalba (Zalba 2006) considers that a design
and development of a Competency Based Education (CBE) is the best choice in order to set
up a curriculum based on social context and necessities.
Actually it is necessary to introduce the concept of academic competence or competence to
generalize. It is difficult to define objectively what an Academic Competence is, but it can be
understood as a multidimensional construct composed of the skills, attitudes, and behaviors
of a learner that contribute to academic success in the classroom. In general, a competence
must entail a set of skills of problem solving — enabling the individual to resolve genuine
problems or difficulties that he or she encounters and, when appropriate, to create an
effective product — and must also entail the potential for finding or creating problems —
and thereby laying the groundwork for the acquisition of new knowledge (Gardner 1993).
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