Raising Lifelong Learning Skills Using Learning Technology at University for Foreigners of Perugia

Soft skills are a set of socio-emotional abilities considered as fundamental for personal development, for academic and work achievement and long-term success, and higher education is today called to support the graduates' employability and to provide effective tools to face the contemporary society fostering both technical and soft skills of its students. The University of Foreigners of Perugia has addressed this topic with the adoption of a new lifelong learning skills' development and assessment model based on a social-constructivist view of teaching and learning oriented towards elements of intercultural education, enclosing the training of soft skills into hard skills courses and devising a soft skills' assessment process in order to provide a reliable and suitable procedure both for the community of learners and for assessors. The model has been embedded in few experimental courses selected from different Master's degrees and our teachers was involved in a training pathway using innovative learning technologies such as LMS (Learning Management Systems) and other digital tools in order to foster students' skills. For the pathways has been used approaches as blended learning, collaborative learning, flipped classroom, spaced learning, learning by doing. In this paper we present and analyze the data collected during our courses. The investigation show that the use of learning technology increased students' active participation.