Josep Llach Pagès

Complementing education with competence development: an ICT-based application

Nowadays, university policies highlight the importance of complementing teaching activities with competence development in the framework of the European Higher Education domain. A previous step for this concerns the development of an effective, efficient, practice-oriented, and user-friendly competence evaluation tool. The main objective of this article is to illustrate the use of a competence self-evaluation tool and to explore the implications of such Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tool for education. We use a web-based tool designed to assess and develop social and personal competences, which is applicable to the learning process. We apply it to a Spanish university, with students considered as project managers of their studies. We obtain some validation of the tool as an instrument for self-evaluation, with effects on the attitude towards learning, providing knowledge on the contribution of the learning activities to developing competences. We also discuss a series of implications at different levels of the education community: university management, teaching centres and, just as important, students.