critical spirit and decision-taking, namely
by studying cases.
A Graduation is more and more a long term
contract with knowledge while its term is becoming
shorter and shorter due to the new demands and
skills the global markets impose.
Marcelo (2002) shares this opinion and supports
the idea that nowadays knowledge has an expiry
date, which forces us more than ever to establish
formal and informal guarantees so that the citizens
have to regularly keep up to date.
One of the political decisions with a stronger
impact on education in the last three years in the
European Union and consequently in Portugal was
the Bologne Act. Here a new educational spirit or
paradigm centred on learning has been proclaimed
“more than a social status opening potentialities of
interdisciplinary training with an easier
diversification and articulation of the basic trainings
with the specialized trainings” (Cruz, 2004).
However and also according to Cruz this new
paradigm needs time as it involves a cultural
adaptation and does not happen just out of an
administrative reform.
Therefore we couldn’t disagree more with the
thought of a General from Chile “we come to
university to study, not to think” (Sepúlveda, 2004).
Knowledge production takes place in schools of
different levels and areas and also in other
organizations such as enterprises, associations, and
so on. This integration allows the building of a new
knowledge that has to be apprehended by people and
organizations in the sense that the learning happens
to everyone for a lifetime.
3 THE TEACHING PROCESS:
FROM SCHOOL ATTENDANCE
TO VIRTUAL REALITY
The digital revolution has broken time and space
limitations and has generated a notion of a global
market independently of its nature and has made it
possible to take into account every client or group
of people or even interests individually (Molenar,
1998).
This revolution sets the Knowledge Age and
allows the emergency of new concepts at
economical, social, political and educational levels.
Concerning the latter we are watching “an
anarchistic growth of the trans-national education “
as a result of the “liberalization movement of
educational services essentially from the USA”
(Costa, Teixeira and Rei, 2004).
Thus it is essential to create a culture of virtual
education for the teachers, the students, the
institutions and the nation itself, in that it promotes
the knowledge outside school benches and responds
to the fears of those who really need it.
Those needs may be just short trainings on
specific subjects or disciplines and not necessarily
complete courses just as they are taught nowadays
even if they take place in semi-attendance situations.
It is therefore important to start as time is of the
essence and a non-organizational and country
position is losing competitiveness every day.
As believers of the potentialities the NICT bring
to the teaching process and particularly to the high
education, we have chosen a hybrid process, that is
attended lessons supported by a web page within the
School website (Business Administration College).
The reasons that have made us choose the semi-
attendance model were the following:
• To be able to respond to each student’s
pace, complemented by tutorship;
• To provide a preview over the academic or
informative contents which become
essentially a permanent aid of access to key
concepts, the nuclear structure and
examples, more than a mere consultation
item;
• To promote skills and abilities development
in a process of self-learning essential to
initiative and decision-taking.
This was a personal decision and aimed to be a
first experience to be adopted later on with a strong
support, specially by the night students of
Accounting and Finance (taking into account the fact
that their timetables often prevent them from
attending lessons), or with a promotion of the
courses in a virtual model concerning auditing and
accounting.
These goals imply joining two educational
models (school attendance and virtual lessons)
seeking to fit and adapt to the students traditional
studying rhythm, without missing teacher support
and at the same time to introduce and provide
support material beforehand as well as privileged
contacts with the teachers.
Hence we have created a new space of
communication between teacher and student that has
largely gone beyond the classrooms and promoted
learning as well as a whole new kind of
relationships.
Fortunately we have long ago abandoned the
straight technological view (automatic task handling,
of which invoicing, salary processing or accounting
are examples, as well as graph building), and
adopted a integrating perspective as a factor to be
considered at the organizations strategic positioning.
THE TEACHING OF AUDITING: FROM SCHOOL ATTENDANCE TO VIRTUAL SCHOOL
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