The Experience of an Online University Course for Learning Written Communication Skills in ICT Studies

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) essays, reports and projects are often difficult to read and understand, usually not because their content is complex but because they are badly written and presented, showing that students, who are future or current professionals in the field, lack the ability to write clearly and precisely. To address the problem, we at the Computing, Multimedia and Telecommunication Studies Department of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) decided to design a new course specifically to improve our students’ written communication skills. The course was created by following an iterative and incremental design method, adopting a holistic and integrated approach and taking into account all key aspects: educational, organisational and technological. Once designed, the course was put into practice and implemented from the second semester of academic year 2004/05 in our Bachelor in Computing Engineering program. A total of 5,036 students have taken the course until the second semester of 2013/14.