Professor M. Jesús Marco defends her doctoral thesis

Program

Abstract

The importance of written communication skills for professionals in the field of ICT is widely referred to in the literature, which also mentions the shortcomings of many professionals when writing reports, projects or other documents. However, despite the widespread perception of the situation, the curricula of ICT degrees, especially in the European context, have proposed little or no training in this skill. Not until recently, in the last decade, this trend has begun to change as a result of the gradual adaptation of curricula to the guidelines of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA).

The EHEA clearly promotes the explicit integration into the curricula of teaching and learning mechanisms for skills such as communication skills. It is therefore an ideal time to study different ways to do it, put them in practice and studying their effectiveness. The present study makes a contribution to research in this area, which is based on the design of a teaching-learning system for written communication skills to enhance students' competence in the ICT curricula at the UOC.

It is the design of a system that follows a holistic approach, considering all relevant aspects involved in the teaching-learning system and attaining to a global curricular perspective, including pedagogical, organizational and technological aspects. Considered as a necessary step in the right design of our system, this work includes a systematic review of scientific literature on the subject. Also, we have pursued a case study to analyze the prior experience of UOC accumulated so far, which consisted in a dedicated course in written communication skills. We then present and justify the design of the proposed teaching-learning system, both globally and in its transversal part, including the detailed description of the goals that are set, the process design decisions, as well as the further development and implementation in the new ICT curricula at the UOC. The work concludes with a critical analysis of the results and contributions achieved so far, and with some ideas for further work.

The approach adopted in this research is addressed from the perspective of the Curricular Engineering and using a methodological approach that combines various methods of rational inquiry. The core method of reference followed across the thesis is Design Research, but is has also been combined with those of Literature Review and In-Depth Case Study, this last one for the description and analysis of the our prior referred experience at UOC.