Abstract:

Nowadays, the Higher Education Students must be provided with a properly ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) equipment and ICTs skills to face the daily teaching/learning activities. Thus, improvements in the educational quality are not possible without ICTs inclusion. In this sense, Universities have promoted innovative experiences supported by ICTs, like the Virtual Learning Environments. Therefore, factors as Students’ ICTs equipment and ICTs training must be considered in order to characterize the student profile. This research was conducted in the Veterinary Faculty of the University of Murcia (Spain), with the aim to get some information about the Students’ ICTs equipment and ICTs training. An amount of 177 surveys was obtained during the year 2010. One of the items evaluated was the Social Networks belonging. Thus, the 82.30% of the students belonged to the Tuenti Social Network, and the 56.60% to Facebook. On the other hand, the 99.40% of the students had a personal computer and the 87.60% had an Internet connection from its habitual place of residence. About the ICTs skills declared by the students, the mean reached a value of 3.29 (SD=0.80) in a Likert scale from 1 to 5. In conclusion, the ICTs equipment and ICTs training showed by the Veterinary Students (University of Murcia) were high.

Keywords:

Virtual Learning Environments, Information and Communication Technologies, Higher Education.