El uso de las redes sociales en el marco del Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior

This paper describes the experience of three novice lecturers and a mentor lecturer, after their participation in the project "Beginner Teacher Training" organized by the Institute of Education Sciences (ICE) at the University of Seville during the academic year 2011-2012. The incorporation of social networks to the university teaching methodology and an intensive use of the WebCT virtual platform were proposed as two of the activities to be developed. Our objective in this article is to determine if there is an improvement in the student results when new technologies that require active student participation are incorporated as the basis of the teaching methodology. To this end, a field experiment is carried out by using the results of three different subjects for the academic course 2011-2012: Introduction to Finance (first year), Derivatives Financial Markets (third year), both belong to the degree in Finance and Accounting, and Corporate Finance (fourth year) of the degree in Business Administration and Management. With this analysis we aim to: (a) contribute to a better understanding when implementing new technologies into the teaching methodology, and (b) verify to what extent a student's active participation can predict a good mark in the exam. By using descriptive statistics and logistic regression analysis, the results show a marked improvement in the academic performance of those students whose participation is more active in the pursuit of the subject.