Abstract:

The paper focuses on target-oriented strategies for teaching an IT Applied in Social Sciences course in English, taught in the first year of the BA level, for groups of students including many international students, during the academic year 2022-2023, and studying the international students’ interactions on the up-to-date topic of Digital Society . We adopted a goal-oriented approach in delivering the course, focusing on the importance of digital skills and digital impact within our present society.

The course covers basic IT and Internet services characteristics and principles, as well as the most important moments in IT evolution and practical tasks regarding spreadsheet analysis, a Wordpress website and a team work research assignment on e-activities. We strongly focus on the international students’ groups interactions on the topic of digital society and specific types of electronic activities and their impact or implementation level in different countries.
We briefly overview the course characteristics, which have been described in previous papers – for specializations in Romanian. For the student feed-back analysis, we used the data provided by the official Babes-Bolyai University (UBB) teacher evaluation tool, which is included in our university’s academic information system AcademicInfo. The course educational materials were prepared in English on the faculty’s moodle e-learning platform. The course was also broadcasted online, using MS Teams (which was also used during the online teaching period).

We constantly revealed the usefulness of digital skills, practical benefits of the course and the importance of IT impact in various society fields; in this respect, the team assignment on e-activites had a very important role. In the first course, we had an invited speaker from a company, who presented employability issues and how students could better prepare for their employment interviews. In this framework, we emphasized how students could use the practical assignments we have been working on during the course for their employability portfolio.

We also analyze the students’ final grades and discuss the benefits of the bonuses we introduced for student active involvement in the course activities.
Using UBB’s teacher evaluation tool, English line students graded the course with an average of 4.43, while the English line students graded the course with an average of 4.38, very good scores, on a scale 1-5, where 1 is very poor and 5 is very good. Students expressed a general positive feed-back towards the course content, the acquired knowledge and the usefulness of the practical assignments they have worked on, especially the team research assignment on e-activities, all these aspects leading to an overall very good rating of the course.

Regarding the student interactions on digital society topics, we emphasize the positive effects of the team-work assignment on electronic activities, within which students approached digital topics of interest from different countries, including their home countries

Keywords:

Goal-oriented learning, interactive learning, practical assignments, basic IT course, international students, student feed-back, digital society.