Monitoring Of Students' Soft Skills Development Within Foreign Language Learning Using Online Technologies

Abstract

Digital transformation in the world poses new challenges for workers: employers now demand employees possessing excellent professional, management, and communication skills. But modern higher education is not ready for developing such soft skills due to several problems occurred: (1) a lack of a unified typology of soft skills; (2) differences in understanding of importance of developing soft skills between students, higher education professionals, and employers; (3) unavailability and the lack of focus of higher education institutions on the development of students' soft skills; (4) the lack of valid methodologies for developing soft skills. The author used a method of content analysis of scientific literature and found out that there is relevance and necessity of improving students' soft skills and for managing this process in digital environment pedagogical monitoring can be used as it provides opportunities for well-timed control and solving occurring problems. Consequently, the aim of the research was to design a model for monitoring students' soft skills development using online technologies. The designed model includes usage of different types of monitoring and various learning and controlling teaching technologies. The experiment was carried out within foreign language learning as it can provide useful means of soft skills development. The study involved 226 first-year students of Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University and was aimed at developing 3 categories of soft skills: communication, management, professional skills. Based on the content analysis, soft skills were developed using interactive teaching technologies; learning activities were uploaded into the Moodle, as well as testing was online. After utilizing the model proposed we figured out the statistical difference between results obtained during initial, intermediate, and final stages of the experiment, which proved the model's efficiency. Therefore, the model can be useful for soft skills development within foreign language learning in the system of higher education.