Abstract:

On this paper we present a project about training on digital skills, aimed at UNAM high school students.This project is named Retos TIC (which means ICT Challenges). This Project has been designed and developed in the Coordination of Technologies for Education in Department of Computing and Information and Communication Technologies (acronym in Spanish:DGTIC) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

Retos TIC is an on line course designed to support students to acquire or strengthen basic digital skills that will be useful in their academic, personal and professional life.

This project is one of the many actions taken under the program “h@bitat puma”, which is highly relevant to the institution, because it responds to a substantial action line of the Rectory that aims to improve educational processes taking place at UNAM, updating and adapting them to the current times.

Due to the difficulty involved in this challenge, it has been necessary to work on different approaches and at different levels.
One of the main strategies of the program was to train the teachers in the educational use of ICT. In order to accomplish this purpose, we have designed and applied many workshops through which we have trained over 5,000 teachers along the past few years. Complementarily, other action has been to provide teachers the possibility of having one or more virtual classrooms to integrate the ICTs into their teaching practice by implementing a b-learning mode.

Another line of action, which will be discussed in this paper, is related to the direct work with the youth, with university students.
Based on the application of a diagnostic questionnaire (TICómetro) which has been applied to high school freshmen in the past three years, we identified the need to standardize student’s digital skills. It is precisely at that point where Retos TIC Project makes sense. The level of digital skills students should have in high school has been determined based on international standards, adapting them to our students.

Retos TIC is an online course designed in Moodle, available to UNAM students through an account and a password. It consists of activities, not sequenced, and designed under the approach of “learning by doing”. Each activity addresses a topic related to academic or general culture content. Activities are organized into four blocks: Processing and information management; Access to Internet information; Security, and Online collaboration and communication.

The activities present real situations to the students that they may face in their academic or outside life, in whose solution the use of a specific digital tool is required. The purpose is to promote the development of digital skills in contexts where the use of technological tools makes sense for the student.

Retos TIC was put at the disposal of students a few months ago. The current stage of the project is to evaluate the results and to increase the program by implementing more activities. We believe that the didactical model involved in this Project could be very useful to other colleagues who are working on the same line around the world.

Keywords:

Digital skills, design of online activities.