Abstract:

Shared Learning is a promising field for teaching transversal courses to improve basic academic skills among students of first year in the university. Our universities provide access to platforms where the teacher can save contents to be shared with them. However, we always have to motivate our students and this is possible if they like writing about attractive subjects. We think Popular Science offers a set of topics with a strong link with academic essays but more flexible for somebody not well skilled in writing an academic paper. Our proposal is to use Shared Learning with cloud platforms to teach basic academic skills for writing and communicating topics taken from the field of Popular Science. In accordance with basic theoretical framework of Cognitive Learning and scholars from field of Communication we will provide an answer to the learning results we get. We used the quantitative methodology of surveys. We handed to our students up a questionnaire to get knowledge of basic academic writing skills acquired in this course and with some questions about common mistakes they detected when they did proofreading for some shared writings among them. We obtained results of learning which invites us to encourage our students in their process of continuous shared self-learning. In this process they recognise the motivation of feedback they receive from their classmates. As a conclusion, we can say shared learning of writing skills, with cloud platforms, it becomes a promising field for teaching writing competences.

Keywords:

Academic Writing Skills, Popular Science, Cloud Computing, Shared Learning, Communication Skills, Cognitive Learning Theories.