Digital Competencies and Soft Skills for Final Qualification Assessment: Case Study of Students of Foreign Languages Programs in India

The global pandemic and subsequent quarantine measures and restrictions have posed an array of challenges to the structure and procedure of the university summative assessment process. Qualification assessment for Foreign Languages major programs is a strict regimen that involves different stages (oral and written exams, final project viva, internal and external review). This paper presents a comprehensive case study analysis of the practices of the ICFAI Business School (Hyderabad, India) digital qualification assessment for students of European (English, French, Italian, Spanish, German) and Asian (Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Hindi) Languages major programs, employed in the year 2020 due to quarantine measures. The survey and analysis of soft skills and corresponding educational activities, ICT tools applied, and corresponding digital competencies implemented is used to assess the transformation of real-life qualification assessment practices into the online and hybrid formats. The investigation identifies various groups of applied digital skills and collaboration skills, utilized through the qualification assessment process by primary stakeholders (students).