Author: Maria Jesús Marco Galindo
Programme: Doctoral Programme in Education and ICT (e-learning)
Language: Catalan
Supervisors: Dr Joan Antoni Pastor Collado and Dr Maria Ribera Sancho Samsó
Faculty / Institute: eLearn Center
Subjects: Higher Education, Universities
Key words: Written communicative skill, Curricular engineering, Assessment by skills, Cross-disciplinary skills
Area of knowledge: e-Learning

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Summary

The importance of written communication skills for professionals in the field of ICT is widely referred to in the literature, which also mentions the shortcomings of many professionals when writing reports, projects, or other documents. However, despite the widespread perception of the situation, the curricula of ICT degrees, especially in the European context, have proposed little or no training in this skill. Not until recently, in the last decade, has this trend has begun to change as a result of the gradual adaptation of curricula to the guidelines of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA).

The EHEA clearly promotes the explicit integration into the curricula of teaching and learning mechanisms for skills such as communication skills. It is therefore an ideal time to study different ways to do it, put them into practice, and study their effectiveness. The present study makes a contribution to research in this area, which is based on the design of a teaching-learning system for written communication skills to enhance students' competence in the ICT curricula at the UOC.

It is a system design that follows a holistic approach, considering all relevant aspects involved in the teaching-learning system and aspiring to a global curricular perspective, including pedagogical, organizational, and technological aspects. Considered as a necessary step in the right design of our system, this work includes a systematic review of scientific literature on the subject. Also, we have pursued a case study to analyse the prior experience which UOC has accumulated so far, which consisted of a dedicated course in written communication skills. We then present and justify the design of the proposed teaching-learning system including the detailed description of the goals that are set, the process design decisions, as well as the further development and implementation in the new ICT curricula at the UOC. The work concludes with a critical analysis of the results and contributions achieved so far, and with some ideas for further work.

The approach adopted is addressed from the perspective of curricular engineering and uses a methodological approach that combines design research with literature review and in-depth case study.