TOWARDS SUPPORTING THE DEVELOPMENT OF COLLABORATION SKILLS IN UNDERGRADUATE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Abstract

Today’s curricula for undergraduate students stress the development of skills, which have been defined as the “21st century skills”. These skills include creativity, problem solving, decision-making, communication, collaboration and ICT literacy, among others. Accordingly, many higher education organizations, and particularly business schools, are designing new learning activities to train these skills. In this paper we present a learning activity and a supporting computer application called Sketchpad (sketching with iPads), which has been designed with the aim of training some of the “21st century skills”. This learning activity has been introduced in the curricula of an undergraduate course of a business faculty in Santiago de Chile to foster collaborative skills by rotation of students among small groups working in a problem-solving task for an “Information Technology” undergraduate course. A questionnaire applied to the students in a first pilot experiment indicates that Sketchpad can help introducing learning activities that support the development of collaboration and communication skills in the classroom for the case where the rotation of the members among the groups is performed.