(1499) TOGETHER BUT NOT SCRAMBLED: SHARED PRACTICES WITH ICT TO IMPROVE SOFT SKILLS

摘要

The Spanish universities are making a great effort to effectively incorporate the development andassessment of generic skills in their training programs. Information and communications technologies(ICT) offer a wide range of possibilities but they create uncertainty among faculty regarding theprocess and results. It is considered of interest to conduct a study to analyze the scope to which socialskills like commitment, communication and teamwork are acquired by students and teachers. It seeksto ascertain the influence of the learning context (or classroom training) in the development of thesepersonal skills among the participants in the sample.The work unveils not only a study on the self-perception of 257 participants, faculty and alumni, allfrom high educational levels, both virtual and classroom training, referred to the degree of acquisitionand development of the interpersonal skills such as commitment, communication and teamwork, butalso, the relation of the mentioned skills with the frequency of use of the ICT compared to thetraditional teamwork techniques. How does the learning environment influence in the acquisition anddevelopment of the soft skills: engagement, communication and teamwork? Does the use of the ICThave something to do with these skills? An analytic-descriptive methodology is applied to answerthese questions. A survey study was conducted on the basis of the administration of three Evalsoftquestionnaires with inter-judges validation, one for each of the mentioned soft skills. For this study twouniversities have been chosen, Universidad a Distancia de Madrid (UDIMA) offering online trainingenvironment, and Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM) with classroom training modality. Both areuniversities of reference in Spain. UDIMA being the first private university offering undergraduate andmaster's degree programs completely online;;UPM have a long career in technology in-classroomprograms.Some interesting conclusions can be highlighted. This is, in the online context, where there are higherlevels of engagement and teamwork than in the classroom modality. Faculty has higher social skillsthan students and this improves along with age. Gender and the training program appear to influenceon these social skills. On the other hand, through these results it can be confirmed that the use of theICT as forum, chat and social networks, make easier the development of the teamwork's competence.