Abstract:

A lot has been said about the need to develop transversal skills among students of higher education. However, according to a recent study by OCDE in Mexico (2019), faculty believes that its main role is helping students to develop disciplinary knowledge and skills.

Naming this set of skills "transversal" (within many other labels) has been problematic, because it is not clear if transversality has to be reflected in the curriculum or in their performance across different fields and activities. In some institutions, at least in Mexico, the transversal face of the curriculum has been focused from a thematic perspective covering aspects such as gender equity, sustainability, human rights, diversity, entrepreneurship, among others.
At the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos (UAEM for its initials in Spanish), a public regional institution, in order to include the development of these skills in the curriculum we opted for a combined approach, which includes two types of transversal curricular contents: performative (skills) and thematic.
The selected strategy was to design a repertoire of courses which we named Multimodal Transversal Learning Units, intended to cover the most relevant generic skills for us.

The skills were selected based on a wide literature review covering experiences and proposals from national and international universities.
We ended with 9 units, covering three types of skills:
a) Basic academic skills,
b) Digital skills and
c) English language skills.

Within the first group, we developed four units:
1) Strategic Learning (learning to learn);
2) Reading, analysis and synthesis of texts;
3) Oral and written communication;
4) Logical-mathematical thinking.

In the second group, we included three units:
1) Digital and information literacy;
2) Online communication and collaboration;
3) Digital content creation.

The third group included two units:
1) English A1;
2) English A2.

All 9 units are intended to develop specific skills by using contents related to the institutional transversal themes: sustainability, diversity and multiculturality, human rights, gender equity, selfcare, university ethos and national culture and entrepreneurship.

They were defined as multimodal, since they are being designed to be implemented in different modal scenarios: face-to-face, hybrid or virtual.
Different members of e-UAEM's team are participating in the development of these units, as content-experts, instructional designers and producers. Also, thematic experts from different areas of the University are involved in validating the transversal thematic contents.

The aim is to insert these units (all of them or some) in the different undergrad programs offered by the University, promoting interprogram horizontal mobility.
The students are referred to specific units based on an initial diagnostic exam, in order to develop these skills gradually and strategically.

The first implementation just began in 2019 in a sample of programs, but the intention is to generalize the experience as an institutional solution to develop different types of transversal competences within students.

The main contributions of this initiative are:
a) a clear strategy for developing key competences;
b) inclusion of key themes in forming critical and ethical citizens;
c) to promote a flexible operation through multimodality and internal mobility.

Keywords:

Transversal skills, performative, thematic, multimodal, competences.