Abstract:

The current Higher Education is organised around competences. Talking about future university graduates´ competences implies talking about “professional competence”.

Communication and Information Technologies (ICT) competence has become one of the most essential skills required on current university students´ training. To be able to correctly understand and work in the modern world, individuals especially need to master the changing technologies and to widely understand the enormous amount of available information.

In addition, recently general introduction of these technologies on the training field makes it necessary to define a series of guidelines and characteristics that enables the identification of students with an ICT competence.

In this context, the present work was developed as part of an Innovation and Improvement of Teaching Quality Project (IITQP), carried out by the Complutense University of Madrid which groups together plenty of people, with the aim of encouraging ICT competences by designing activities, by defining indicators and levels of knowledge or command. The model that groups the university students´ ICT competences in the Pharmacy Technology training field responds to the Seminar and Theory Program. For each of these aspects, Seminars and Theory, it is understood that the student´s ICT competences go through three levels of command in consecutive order:
Level 1: basic instrumental use competence, focused on technical usage of telematic tools
Level 2: abilities to access and manage information competence
Level3: advanced competence, which enables students to be able to create and produce online information, using ICT skills as communication and expression tools in English and/or Spanish.

This working plan has implied that the student must have the competences of one level to properly carry out the ones on the next level, and later one the ones in the third level. Inconsequence, it has resulted extremely interesting to improve teaching quality as it has offered not only the possibility of providing the students a vision about their ICT competences, but also the possibility of guiding the teachers to a consequent teaching itinerary.

The present work has turned out to be of high interest for the students as it provides them with the possibility of acknowledging their current training on ICT competences and the implementation of that training as a professional competence.

Keywords:

ICT competences, transversal competences, higher education, professional competence, pharmaceutical technology.