Entornos Personales de Aprendizaje (PLE) en estudiantes universitariosmodelo y rediseño de un instrumento de análisis

Abstract

This doctoral thesis is related to the research project "CAPPLE - Competences for lifelong learning based on the use of PLEs (Personal Learning Environments): analysis of future professionals and proposals for improvement". The central theme of the thesis, in line with the project's own theme, is the analysis of the PLE of university students, carrying out an exploratory quantitative study with a wide sample of participants. The concept of PLE continues to this day without a consensual definition and there are two main lines of work in its theoretical conceptualization: that which defines the PLE as a technological environment centred on what happens through student interaction and, on the other hand, a second line of research with a marked pedagogical character, in which the PLE makes us ask ourselves how we use technologies to learn and forces us to analyse the relationships and strategies that we establish between all the resources that make up this personal environment, including the personal learning network (PLN), made up of those people with whom we interact and who contribute to enriching our learning process. In this work we have included a first chapter in which, starting from the importance of training in competences, we have analysed what competences the 21st century citizen has to have, who unquestionably uses and will use technologies in his daily work, in his social and work behaviours, in his family life, in his leisure time,... We understand training in citizenship skills as a basic and inalienable objective of the higher education system, thus coinciding with both national and international regulations in this regard. That is why we have dedicated the second chapter to address the concept and dimensions of digital competence. The competences for 21st century citizenship include digital competence and, based on the analysis of the digital competence construct, we will better understand the importance and validity of the PLE construct, as both are closely interconnected. Thus, after dealing in depth with the models of training for citizenship in chapter 1 and analyzing the importance of digital competence in such training (chapter 2), in chapter 3 we delve into the task of defining and analyzing the concept of PLE. These chapters close the part conceived as a theoretical framework that supports the empirical study of which we present the methodology from chapter 4. We have to clarify that being the CAPPLE project the origin of the thesis, in it we have advanced beyond the results of CAPPLE. From a first version of the CAPPLE questionnaire and a data collection in universities throughout Spain, we have carried out a re-elaboration of the dimensions of the PLE by means of an Exploratory Factorial Analysis and a Confirmatory Factorial Analysis. This procedure has allowed us to study the validity of the model and its components. With all this we have reached the reworking of the CAPPLE model (CAPPLE-2 version) not only from a theoretical perspective, but also with a proposal for the reworking of the questionnaire that could surely be the seed of future research in this field. The Exploratory Factorial Analysis and the Confirmatory Factorial Analysis allow us to validate the factor structure of the CAPPLE model with greater robustness, in addition to ratifying with greater clarity those items of the questionnaire that have demonstrated their ability to describe the sample data. This robustness of the model, validated in CAPPLE and in CAPPLE-2, has allowed us to redesign the new version of the questionnaire referred to in the previous paragraph.