Fostering the Transversal Digital Competences in Higher Education

The project addresses the advanced digital competences in HE and, hence, the gap between the labor market needs and the actual abilities of the students and professional workers. To do this, the first step is to provide a full curriculum on Digital Competences in HE. Then, we focus on developing resources for both teachers and students, creating a methodological guide for teachers to include digital competences in their study plans and several advanced courses that allow students deepening on the most demanded digital skills. The courses will implement a subset of the curriculum.

Emerging technology is reshaping the future of work and Digital Competences (DC) are constantly evolving, hence, influencing the digital skills gap. Through an advanced LMS platform, Sollertia, this project focuses on providing transversal and advanced DC to HE students and graduated workers and preparing them as ICT professionals that meet the labour market demands. In addition, professionals of HE will be provided with a framework to include and evaluate explicitly DC in their curricula.

The activities included in this project to achieve the objectives are:

• Development of a curriculum on transversal/advanced DC in HE.
• Development of a Methodological Guide to include and evaluate DC in Study Plans.
• Development of a multilingual LMS platform supported with gamification.
• Development of pedagogical material, including 1800 test questions.
• Development of audiovisual material to facilitate learning by disabled people.
• Formal course with ECTS accreditation.

The multilingual LMS platform is attractive and deep enough as to engage students of any discipline, redirect them towards ICT profiles, and prepare them for the labour market demands. The LMS represents an example of application of the methodological guide so, along with the curriculum, Tthey constitute useful tools for HE teachers to implement and evaluate DC explicitly in their own curricula.

Therefore, it is expected to influence the ICT skills of future workers in the short- and mid-term.