Abstract:

In this article, the preliminary results of the European project Erasmus+ “21st Century Skills: Changing the Approach to Teaching in Higher Education” (CATCH-21) will be presented.

The main goal of this project is to boost the quality of Higher Education Institutions in teaching the “21st century skills” (critical thinking, collaboration, communication, creativity and innovation, self-direction, making local and global connections and using technology as a tool for learning), with the purpose of helping our students to better understand these competences and, hence, acquire and develop them, so that they can be better prepared and become skilled professionals in the European labour market.

A team of transnational experts from Spain, Turkey, Italy, Bulgary and the Czech Republic are working together in this project, in order to create teaching materials and a pedagogical model concerning the teaching of 21st century skills for both: higher education staff and their students, create an online learning platform to develop these competences, as well as to improve and foster cooperation between the labour market and the higher education institutions.
In order to do so, a qualitative investigation was also carried out with Directors of Human Resources and CEOs from prestigious companies in the different areas and also in Spain.

At San Jorge University we have carried out a training course on these 21st century skills with a group of 25 students (from different ages and fields of study) who were tested before and after their training on their knowledge of these skills. The results have been very positive, as they all have widely improved on their tests. In this session we will present the contents of this course and the topics covered, the methodologies used and the outputs of the same. We will also describe the preliminary findings of the CATCH-21ST project and what our next steps will be.

Keywords:

21st century skills, higher education, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, creativity and innovation, self-direction.