Learning Beyond the Curriculum: PLE and the Development of Soft Skills

Abstract In a connected world where information is available at any time and place, learners adopt a more proactive approach to learning, no longer looking at education institutions as the only place where they can learn. When the knowledge economy demands new types of learners – higher education institutions must look at their students as active participants, fostering the development of skills that go beyond the curriculum and recognising learning as a social process that occurs in and outside the institution walls. To analyse how students, institutions and employers see and value the existence of soft-skills and how they can be fostered in an institutionally supported personal learning environment (PLE), a case study is being developed at University of Aveiro aiming to analyse students’ online presence; to identify which soft-skills are more valued by students, the university and the market; to study how those skills can be fostered through an institutional supported PLE and expressed in an institution-supported platform; to afford the importance of an institutional online platform in scaffolding the construction of the learners’ and institution’s digital identity. Data will be collected through in-depth interviews with students from a master degree course (n = 13), institutional representatives (n = 3) and through questionnaires applied to students. Although still in an early stage, preliminary data reveal that students are using the institutional supported PLE to meet their learning needs to build a more formal but more conscious online presence and to reveal the existence of skills valued by the marketplace.