At our university, we used to have a module on communication skills in our ICT programmes. Often, students were not interested or just studied for the exams and still did not have the required level of communications skills. We converted the module into a coursework-based seminar, without much success. Now, we are hoping that a mandatory work placement in the programme will do the trick.

Lecture based teaching is obsolete now. Students must be actively involved in discussions, presentat ions and quoloqiums. Verbal questioning of students and public answering improve oral communications. Agree that communication and language classes tend to be boring as the matters treated are not in the students field of study. Language lecturers tend to pick remotely relevant topics of discussions and pay too much attention to language features rather than communication.

Hi Ravi,

In the french system in which I work, communication skills module has scored 100% pass rate since the past 4 years because of its uniqueness. The pedagogy tools we use are very meticulous and elaborated, using the learner centered approach rather than the teacher centered approach. I have developed it in 2011 and since then we are using. I will be glad to share it with you or anyone on a face to face session rather here as it is quite long. I am also writing a paper on that matter. I can help you to redesign the module if you want.

Best regards,

Girish

(+230) 57695961

Girish:

I am not sure if you already would share this strategy with Ravi, but I also used "debating" as a dynamic strategy for developing students' communication and critical thinking skills. Please see for a description on how it is used my recent conference paper presented as this year's' 16th Annual Conference on Scholarship in Teaching and Learning (SoTL), South Bend, Indiana, U.S.A.

Best regards,

Debra

Conference Paper Debating: A Dynamic Teaching Strategy for Motivating Student...

How can we inculcate better communications skills in ICT graduates?

Suggesting the following:

Girish - we should meet and discuss this over coffee. Anyone visiting Mauritius is most willing to join in ;) .

Debra - I owe you a coffee as well for the debate tip. I usually include a forum on Moodle to stimulate my students to post some thoughts to reflect on different topics (I have to give one mark per reasonable post to force them to participate...). I think the debate format will just make it more interesting. I will keep you informed how it goes.

I agree with you that communication should be the problem of all lecturers - it cannot be just an issue in one module. Unfortunately, with time constraints and increasing content, we spend less and less time on interacting in class. This is where the interactive artifacts of Moodle can come in handy.

I include an interview assignment in my course as well as have real-life projects where the students must interview the client and the client can schedule meetings to discuss progress.  My interview assignment is typically either with a theorist in the field, a designer of a new project, generally someone with the stature that demands a certain level of communication.  A lot of learning by doing in my classes and this helps students as they make the transition from course-work to graduation back to real world activities.

Sandwiched learning in University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

As part of the programme, students will take core modules on methodology each semester, and will choose one language (French, German or Spanish) to carry through the programme. For each language there will be a language practice and applied language module in both semesters. Students also choose either a technical communication or an e-learning elective in both semesters.

http://www.ul.ie/graduateschool/course/languages-and-ict-content-development

Many engineering colleges in TamilNadu train the students on communication skills. They hire a consultants over long periods of one to two years to groom the students and improve the employability skills.

At my school we incorporate speaking skills in classes that require technical skills.  Specifically, software engineering where they need to communicate with the client and they must also make presentation to the class, as peers to communicate the technical ideas.  The attached paper talks about how it basically works, I have changed things since writing the paper but the basic concepts still stand.  The other class I have integrated speaking is Computer Information Systems.  This was more where they had to describe what software they selected for a specific problem, why and why they didn't choose something else.

Article It Is Time To Stand Up And Communicate