Development of Professional Competences in Higher Education through Active Learning

Higher education students increasingly need to develop, during their academic journey, a set of personal, social and professional skills to allow their quick integration into the professional market. This requires a close collaboration between higher education institutions (HEIs) and the business/industrial context but also a change in HEIs pedagogical models, which should now be based on active learning methodologies, particularly when supported by information and communication technologies and applications like Serious Games. However, not all HEIs are ready to deal with such a radical change in educational paradigms. Thus an analysis of the Portuguese context was carried out, trying to characterize the situation and to find cases of good practices that could serve as motivating examples for the other institutions. This article reports this analysis which showed that, although still far from an optimal state, there has been a clear improvement in the past few years.