Skills needed to be successful in the world have changed, and there is a gap between those learned at school and those required to function at work and in society. A broader range of skills is required to learn, communicate, collaborate, and solve problems in digital environments. Twenty-first century skills have been identified by UNESCO, OECD, and others as competences required for a sustainable future of the knowledge society. The aim was to learn the design principles involved in the incorporation of these skills into the curriculum, find out possible ways to teach and assess them, and examine how this process could be personalized using Information and Communications Technology (ICT). A literature review was carried out through a qualitative metasynthesis, which identified 43 studies that met the inclusion criteria. From the in-depth analysis, it can be seen that although the incorporation of 21st century skills into the curriculum, teaching methodologies, and the use of ICT are all recurrent themes, there is still a need for further research into the design and implementation of new instruments for assessment and the ways in which the teaching–learning process can be personalized.

Se entiende por Investigación Basada en Diseño un tipo de investigación orientado hacia la innovación educativa cuya característica fundamental consiste en la introducción de un elemento nuevo para transformar una situación. Este tipo de investigación trata de responder a problemas detectados en la realidad educativa recurriendo a teorías científicas o modelos disponibles de cara a proponer posibles soluciones a dichos problemas. A este fin, se diseñan programas, paquetes didácticos, materiales, estrategias didácticas, etc.., que se someten a pruebas y validación, y, una vez mejorados, se difunden a la realidad escolar.El proceso de investigación presenta, generalmente, dos etapas: investigar hasta crear un nuevo producto y sus sucesivas mejoras, y por otro lado aportar conocimiento en forma de principios que contribuyen a nuevos procesos de diseño. Entendiendo producto no sólo objetos materiales (libros de texto, programas de vídeo, aplicaciones de ordenador, juegos de simulación,...), sino también procesos y procedimientos (métodos de enseñanza, planes de organización escolar, estrategias didácticas, distintos programas,...).

A key aspect of the effective supervision of PhD research is the supervisor-student relationship. This interaction is affected by the characteristics and needs of students and institutional conditions, as well as the skills, attitudes, and roles of supervisors and their supervisory styles. When supervision is carried out at a distance, it entails an additional challenge, mainly concerning interaction. The purpose of this study is to improve the research process, supervision, and design of virtual environments in order to support this supervision. The study identifies the supervisory relationships that affect doctoral research conducted at a distance from the student’s academic institution. It also describes how students and their supervisors perceived the characteristics of supervision and the skills and attitudes students perceived in and expected from their supervisors. For data collection, semistructured interviews were used. The results indicate important differences between supervisors’ perceptions concerning their own role and students’ needs regarding supervision, and they demonstrate the importance of attending to student needs and, on the part of supervisors, exercising responsibility in the development of research competencies in students, as is the case of independence of criteria and autonomy.

Resumen: This paper presents the findings of a study carried out in the academic year 2014–2015 at the faculty of Education of the University of Murcia with first year degree students in Primary Education studying Research and ICT. The study started with the application of the DIGCOM questionnaire to analyze the digital competences of 134 students. The questionnaire served as an initial task to help students reflect on their digital competences. The subject was developed around tasks which adopted a transversal approach and used the nature of the contents itself to direct and improve students’ digital competencies. Finally, the initial questionnaire was reformulated and run in order to ascertain the students’ self-perception of their improvement in these competencies through the tasks they had performed. Below we present the tasks carried out, the organization of each subject and the most relevant data regarding the self-perception of digital competencies of the future primary school teachers enrolled at the University of Murcia. The data reveal, on the one hand, that the students participating consider themselves to be competent in the most basic aspects of digital competencies and, on the other, their perception that the work done in the subject has helped them quite a lot in improving their competencies.

Blended learning, más allá de la clase presencial

This study systematically reviews, classifies and synthesizes the research related to Emerging Technologies (ETs) in the field of formal education between 2006 and 2016, aiming to identify areas of uncertainty for future research. In addition, this study is a tool to guide teachers in their decision making when incorporating technologies in the classroom. The research approach was mixed and it analyzed 288 studies that met the inclusion criteria. Results show that all the studies aimed to improve and to transform the different educational processes through the incorporation of ETs. The most used methodology was qualitative research; the survey was the most widely used instrument; the most affected population was the students in the context of higher education; the competences to improve was critical thinking, followed by problem solving, collaborative work, creative thinking, and decision-making. Emerging Technologies (ETs) are contextual, adaptable, evolving, ubiquitous, disruptive, innovative, complementary and generate a degree of uncertainty, they can be complex, accessible, functional, easy to use, interactive and it found that Web 2.0 technologies are the most used in the studies.