Abstract:

Over the last years, the inclusion of cross-curricular competences into higher education programs has become a major challenge to tackle when attempting to enhance the student academic progress. In particular, how and when to transmit these competences as well as how to evaluate the student’s progress on them represent essential issues worth to be studied.

In the last few years, the IT (Information Technology) committee of the CRUE (Spanish Association of University Chancellors) along with REBUIN (Network of Spanish University Libraries) are working on developing a learning framework on information literacy and IT competences in university degrees. Information literacy competences are meant as those skills concerning information searching, efficient information selection and information analysis and organisation. For some time now, the University of Zaragoza has successfully been developing online courses on information literacy competences for students belonging to different degrees. With that background, our proposal focuses on incorporating missing IT-related issues into these courses, so eventually allowing the student to obtain both types of competences at the same time.

In this paper we put forward an experience carried out in the University of Zaragoza. It results from the collaboration in a joint project of the Computer Science and Engineering Systems Department and the Library of the University of Zaragoza. For the last few years the University Library has offered a course (as an add-on of compulsory first-year courses in different degrees) aimed to teach students the information literacy competences they need to know. Throughout the project we have studied which IT-related content might complement the current course and then we have incorporated this content to it, so students are able to learn skills of both types in a parallel way. The aim is to keep students from perceiving both types of competences as completely different aspects in the same course. With that in mind, we have elaborated material – including readings, exercises and tests – connecting concepts and practices concerning both types of competences. We have added into the course the following IT-related contents: i) use of text processor tools to manage citations and bibliography in an automatic fashion; ii) proper use of media content in digital documents from both technical and legal perspectives; and iii) use of cloud-based repositories for document backup.

Besides providing a theoretical flavour of the proposed approach, in this paper we also present an evaluation to show the pros and cons derived from the course. In particular, we intend to analyse the contents suitability, the learning results as well as the degree of satisfaction of students who took the course. In order to do that, we support our evaluation on first-year students in the degree of Journalism through different surveys measuring qualitative and quantitative features. We deploy the course by using the open source Moodle platform.

Keywords:

IT competences, competence evaluation, online learning.