Bridging Students’ Soft Skills Gaps with MOOCs

Abstract

Students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) enter the labour market with recognized high level technical skills, but often need to enforce their soft skills in order to build effective professional relationships, according to companies view. Polimi Open Knowledge (POK), the MOOCs portal developed by Politecnico di Milano, starts bridging this gap with a series of MOOCs on soft skills, opened by Conflict Management and Change Management and growing with a new course on Working into Multidisciplinary Teams [4]. In these MOOCs an innovative role is played by the integration between role plays and clips taken from famous movies, in order to foster the student personal engagement through involving and enjoyable resources.

Soft Skills: Connecting Classrooms with the Workplace—A Systematic Review

“…In "Meeting the Demand: Teaching Soft Skills," Wilhelm et al (2002) contested that gaps between affective or "soft" skills demanded by today's employers and those provided by our educational institutions seems to exist. Despite all the efforts by educators to improve graduates' soft skills and produce workready graduates, many employers are still not satisfied with the soft skills and employability quality of new graduates (Agus et al, 2011;Corti et al, 2014;Morrison et al, 2011;Tsirkas et al, 2020;Tulgan, 2016) (Wilhelm et al, 2002).…”

Strengthening Mathematical Skills through MOOCs: A Case Study

“…However, despite its rapid expansion in the academic world, its use is usually restricted to complement the knowledge, and not as an active learning tool. Nevertheless, these courses have much more methodological possibilities that are being implemented gradually [2].…”