TOGETHER BUT NOT SCRAMBLED: SHARED PRACTICES WITH ICT TO IMPROVE SOFT SKILLS

The Spanish universities are making a great effort to effectively incorporate the development and assessment of generic skills in their training programs. Information and communications technologies (ICT) offer a wide range of possibilities but they create uncertainty among faculty regarding the process and results. It is considered of interest to conduct a study to analyze the scope to which social skills like commitment, communication and teamwork are acquired by students and teachers. It seeks to ascertain the influence of the learning context (or classroom training) in the development of these personal skills among the participants in the sample. The work unveils not only a study on the self-perception of 257 participants, faculty and alumni, all from high educational levels, both virtual and classroom training, referred to the degree of acquisition and development of the interpersonal skills such as commitment, communication and teamwork, but also, the relation of the mentioned skills with the frequency of use of the ICT compared to the traditional teamwork techniques. How does the learning environment influence in the acquisition and development of the soft skills: engagement, communication and teamwork? Does the use of the ICT have something to do with these skills? An analytic-descriptive methodology is applied to answer these questions. A survey study was conducted on the basis of the administration of three Evalsoft questionnaires with inter-judges validation, one for each of the mentioned soft skills. For this study two universities have been chosen, Universidad a Distancia de Madrid (UDIMA) offering online training environment, and Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM) with classroom training modality. Both are universities of reference in Spain. UDIMA being the first private university offering undergraduate and master's degree programs completely online; UPM have a long career in technology in-classroom-programs. Some interesting conclusions can be highlighted. This is, in the online context, where there are higher levels of engagement and teamwork than in the classroom modality. Faculty has higher social skills than students and this improves along with age. Gender and the training program appear to influence on these social skills. On the other hand, through these results it can be confirmed that the use of the ICT as forum, chat and social networks, make easier the development of the teamwork's competence.