Rosalynn Argelia Campos Ortuño

Multimedia resources to develop information competence: A methodological design for the comparative study of undergraduate and post-graduate students in two public universities in Chile and Spain

In our current information society, the development of information competency is one of the basic objectives to be developed in primary, secondary and even higher education, as pointed out by both the Horizon Report and UNESCO. At the tertiary stage of education, it has been observed that in both Chile and Spain students in many cases have not developed the basic skills involved in information competence equally, and they run into problems when they have to write the research papers demanded in many of their subjects, including final degree projects and/or undergraduate dissertations. The University of Salamanca (USAL) is carrying out a project of teaching innovation to create four Learning Objects (LOs) under the Creative Commons licence, designed to accommodate different learning styles and to help students learn more about sources of information, the Google search engine, meta-search engines, and academic plagiarism. According to the outcomes of the pilot study, the LOs increased student interest and motivation for further developing these competences. Having detected these same needs at the University of Santiago de Chile (USACH), a joint project is being carried out to adapt and reuse the LOs in the Chilean context, with a view to carryng out comparative studies, the design of which is presented herein.