IMPROVING ACTIVITIES TO DEVELOP SOFT SKILLS USING FLIPPED TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Flipped Teaching is a methodology that enables students to be more active and self-sufficient in their learning process, since it overthrows the classical teacher-student responsibilities assigned within it, improving skills related to planning and autonomy in students. Moreover, in higher education, soft skills have to be developed during this learning process, since graduated students, which are about to enter in the working world, must be properly trained. In this regard, university professors have to provide students with good materials and efficient activities covering both aspects. At the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia a group of 4 professors has been working in active methodologies and flipped teaching during the past 3 years, a period in which several experiences have been conducted. This paper summarizes a set of lessons learnt about the link that most popular face-to-face activities have with the acquisition of soft skills, and proposes some new actions aimed at improving the type of training activities carried out during the educational practice in the frame of flipped teaching. Based on our experience, we highlight some of the common failures and weak points in diverse teaching subjects like Computer Science, Telecommunications, Linguistics, Agricultural Science and Physics, and soft skills such as comprehension and integration, critical thinking and long-life learning, among others. The discussion and results are based on a bank of surveys in which students assess the validity of the educational practice and the influence of these practices on the development and acquisition of these soft skills.