Soft skills with learning technologies: the project at the University for Foreigners of Perugia

The aim of the paper is to present the main activities of the training pathways developed at the University for Foreigners of Perugia to help students to face the challenges that a changing working life poses to young graduates. The project stems from the awareness of importance of training students’ skills both for their future employability and for the harmonious development of their competences. Recent approaches for embedding the training of soft skills into hard skills courses are adopted, such as blended learning, experiential learning, flipped classroom, and learning by doing. The learning process is carried out by the community of learners in different environments in which students contextually gain knowledges and skills in an innovative and collaborative way through targeted activities. The focus of the project is on the whole soft skills training process which has been divided in five phases: design, develop, assess, recognise, and analyse. After analysing the literature on the subject, we have identified six soft skills to be considered in our project: problem solving, adaptability, team working, networking, multitasking, and communication skills. The soft skills development process has been implemented in few experimental courses, selected from different Master’s degrees. Teachers have been trained in order to foster students’ soft skills by means of innovative learning technologies such as LMS (Learning Management Systems) and other digital tools. A soft skills testing and assessment process has been devised in order to have a suitable and affordable procedure both for students and assessors. Once the student has been assessed, she is awarded with a digital certificate that follows the open badge standard. Therefore, such a certificate can be used in a variety of software platforms worldwide like, for example, social media, blogs or e-portfolio systems. Finally, the whole soft skills’ learning process is scientifically analysed by means of learning analytics tools, i.e., by continuously monitoring learners’ data collected during their online activities in LMS systems.