Redesigning university courses based on generic skills via multicriteria analysis methods

The academic community, quality assurance organisations and researchers seek to find procedures to support the curricula in order to promote the personal development of students and enhance their employability. In this context, emphasis is placed on the generic skills of students. This paper suggests a process that supports generic skills improvement through an academic course at a traditional university environment, at the initiative of the instructor. This process requires the course redesign and is divided into various aspects, such as: skills’ selection, learning outcomes’ reformation, assessment procedures and, finally, feedback to the instructor; the most critical of them addressed as multicriteria problems. All the individual aspects to be handled by the instructor, as the decision-maker, are presented in detail, as well as the pilot implementation within a course of a Greek engineering department. The implementation for two consecutive years, although isolated, delivered satisfactory results but also highlighted the students’ shortcomings.