Document Type

Article

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

*pedagogy

Publication Details

Paper presented at the Higher Education in Transformation Conference, Dublin, 31st. May - 1st. April, 2015.

Abstract

This article presents two similar experiments on curricular flexibility, each of them performed in different Higher Educational Institutions in the network of technological education in Brazil. Both experiments aimed to allow better training routes, specially directed to the idea of the entrepreneurial university, applicable to enrolled students. On the other hand, it intended to reach better management of the Institutes resources. We used in both experiments the same curricular format, where all the subjects that made up a particular course had a workload of 40 hours and lasted only a month. Each month, new students could be enrolled in courses offered by the Institutes instantaneously, allowing ten periods of enrolment of students over a year, instead of only one, two or three. Students who left the Institutes for extended periods could then complete missing subjects, instead of missing them as it would occur in the traditional model. After the conclusion of these experiments, the students completed a survey questionnaire, comparing the traditional curriculum model and the model proposed in this experiment. The survey focused on the following areas: adequacy of time to follow the activities, retain and process the acquired knowledge; facility to interrupt the course; lower losses in case of interruption; adequacy of weekly hours for required frequency and time volume for the courses. For all these variables, this more flexible model was better evaluated by the students, especially to the categories related to course interruption and sufficient time to follow the activities. The students' answers showed that a more flexible curriculum met the expectations of most of them and was favourable to consolidate the Institutes role as entrepreneurial universities.

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