Due to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and its Economic and Business Studies, three professors in the field of Finance from the institute perform an analysis of the evolution of the financial function and a projection of future scenarios in order to identify challenges and opportunities. Joan Llobet introduces the topic based on an academic vision that has adapted to the substantial changes that have occurred and which takes on the challenge of facing the changes still to come. On the other hand is the article by Jorge M. Uribe, a compilation of the most important events of the past 25 years in order to understand how the financial field is currently structured. Through his experience, we will see how concrete aspects evolve (valuation of assets, quantitative risk management, etc.) in order to profile what they are like today. Finally, Àngels Fitó describes the current context of the financial field, establishing its conditioning factors and future direction.
Although Wikipedia is an information source used extensively by students at all academic levels, it is hard to find higher education courses in which Wikipedia has a formal role in the learning process. Using the principal results of the Wiki4HE project as its foundation, this article briefly describes key factors that influence the decisions of academic staff regarding the use of Wikipedia in their teaching. In addition to technological factors relating to the user-friendliness and utility of the work platform this encyclopaedia provides, it also examines the academic and professional factors that have a greater influence: the perceived quality of Wikipedia, its social image, the 2.0 profile of academic staff and their collaborative attitudes, and institutional recognition of this resource.
The article has two main objectives: the first is to highlight the importance of the opinions academic colleagues have of Wikipedia, and the influence this has on decisions to use the encyclopaedia actively in teaching; the second is to show how this decision could be affected by access to a guide to good practice, one that systematically brought together the experiences of other academic staff and enabled an improvement in Wikipedia's social image.
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