Abstract:

Developing transversal or core competences is essential for students, as demonstrated by projects as REFLEX and HEGESCO. In recent years, universities are focusing on developing and certificating how their students are acquiring these competences. However, evidences show that despite these efforts, students are failing to acquire the competences that companies are demanding for. One of the most relevant threats that teachers face when developing core skills in higher education is how to do it in the real situation of their classes. This may result in demotivation of teachers to achieve this challenge. At this moment, an important training task is necessary for both teachers and students, particularly regarding how to develop and evaluate these skills. The general objective of this work is to contribute to the development of core skills to the real situation of grades. This contribution is achieved by collecting and selecting electronic resources, which will be classified and structured according to the core skill they contribute to. Electronic resources were collected from the institutional repository of the Universitat Politècnica de València, containing more than 20,000 resources (https://media.upv.es), as well as from other repositories. Other information such as target audience (students, teachers or both) was also collected from each resources. Results show a wide quantitative and qualitative divergence among resources corresponding to different skills. For example, competences regarding innovation, leadership, public speech, ethics or instrument use are widely supported by electronic resources already available, whereas for other abstract competences such as critical thinking or problem solving resources are scarce. Also, most resources consist in particular examples for students, which may be useful for teachers in the same area of study, but are not useful for others. General information on developing core skills is still missing and therefore efforts should be conducted to unify institutional approaches for developing these skills. This work has a multidisciplinary character, and the objective is not an exhaustive collection of materials, but establishing a more effective organization system of resources for teachers.

Keywords:

Core skills, evaluation, on-line materials, classification, repository.