Abstract:

We are creating an online environment helping students to develop their skills for ICT supported work tasks (Platteaux, Sieber, Moccozet, & Benkacem, 2015). This environment is suited for accompanied or autonomous learning.

A hybrid course, for undergraduate students at the University of Fribourg - Switzerland, is used for testing the principles of this environment. The course is based on scenarios describing the main student work tasks and the methods and tools that can help to perform the tasks. The scenarios are used by students and teachers in order that the course:
1) enhances the discovery and understanding of the competences needed for the student’s job and
2) facilitates the evaluation of the student’s competence level and of his learning progression. Then, our environment must be adaptive because every student must be able to find learning activities and resources adapted to his individual context.

This course experience shows two findings in accordance with the literature:
1) situated practices facilitate the development of a true digital academic culture (Littlejohn, Beetham, & McGill, 2013) and
2) principles of an adaptive e-assessment system are crucial for a support environment (Baneres, Baró, Guerrero-Roldán, & Rodriguez, 2016).

This article analyses how a competence framework can be central for the design and implementation of our environment. This research hypothesis uses the assertion that such a framework has two functions:
1) to describe and define a competence and
2) to inform about how to evaluate this competence (Postiaux, Bouillard, & Romainville, 2010).

Due to their methodological aspect, student ICT skills can develop only if the student is working in his context and uses his disciplinary contents (Romainville, 2007). Consequently, a competence framework is a facilitating tool to describe such contexts because it is “structured in competence domains, in competences and in competence indicators” (Carignan, 2014, p. 11). Applied to student’s job, we obtain:
● Domains: student work tasks (for example: Writing an academic paper);
● Competences: mobilization of methods and ICT tools to perform the tasks (for example: Structuring a written document with a table of contents);
● Indicators: operationalized actions (for example: Making an automatic table of contents in Word).

Our framework describes more and more precise actions within student working contexts, with the various aspects “information x device” of a competence (Tristán-López & Ylizaliturri-Salcedo, 2014).

Then, in order to define the evaluation role of our framework, we apply two principles usually used for writing evaluation rubrics (Berthiaume & Rege Colet, 2013): 1) only a few criteria (to increase the validity of evaluation) and 2) only a few competence levels, easy to be distinguished from each other (to increase its reliability). We define three levels: “discover”, “try and choose”, “deepen”.

With the course students, we test the functions of our competence framework. We check whether the wording of the competence indicators allow a correct identification by students of the different competence levels. Also we ask the students to make a self-evaluation of their own competence level by using the framework and some of their own productions. We can then determine to what extent the framework helps to identify their competences and their levels as well as their learning progression.

Keywords:

ICT skills, higher education, student's job, competence framework, learning environment, adaptive, e-assessment, situated practice.