Abstract:

Digitalization of society is an accelerated and constantly expanding process. Therefore, professors are facing a big challenge to design new ways to teach on the information age. Thusly, ICT offers a big opportunity to take advantage of Internet to create more dynamic, creative and effective academic experiences. This paper presents a learning project developed in Honduras using a MOOC to train students on public speaking performance. The aim of this research was to determine how effective is e-learning to enhance this professional skill on higher education students. The learning activity was conducted during two months with 180 participants enrolled on engineering and business degrees from Universidad Autónoma de Honduras (UNAH), Universidad Tecnológica Centroamericana (UNITEC) and Universidad Católica de Honduras UNICAH. The training used platforms such Google Classroom and YouTube to develop the online interaction through audiovisual lessons and exercises. Findings revealed that 96% of the participants declared to have achieved a higher performance on public speaking. After completing the training, 77.8% of the participants reported improvement on how introduce their presentations and 76.2% of them declared this online experience was helpful to enhance their competence to modulate their voice. It is necessary to repeat more experiences like this, with a largest sample size, to establish definitive conclusions about MOOC´s effectivity to help students on professional skills development such as oral communication.

Keywords:

Public Speaking Skills; Higher Education; Skills Development; Teaching Innovation; Video recording.