Strategies for the communication and collaborative online work by university students

Abstract

The impact that Information and Communications Technologies have in the way today’s young people communicate and interact is unquestionable. This impact also affects the educational field, which is required to respond to the needs of twenty first century students by training them in acquiring new skills and strategies to deal with a changing and uncertain future. In this study, which involved 2,054 university students from all Spanish Universities, it delved into the knowledge of networking strategies and tools used by these students for the effective development of communication processes and the implementation of strategies for collaboration and communication. It has been developed a nonexperimental quantitative methodology and the technique used for collecting information was a questionnaire. The results show that all of them use the Internet to communicate and they have a great use of basic tools to collaborate and interact, but they prefer social networks for being in contact with their peers and establishing relationships. It has been found that students do not have the idea of the Internet as a place to learn. This fact implies new challenges to be solved by Universities, to optimize the possibilities of the networks and institutional platforms as an environment to learn collaboratively..