Personal learning environments in future professionals: nor natives or residents, just survivors

Abstract

This work is a brief view of an exploratory research about Personal Learning Environments developed during these last three years with a Spanish sample. Understanding of PLE can help us to improve our learning designs in order to better development of professional competences of students. Thus, we have implemented a questionnaire with 2.054 final answers of Spanish university students in last course of their degrees. The questionnaire has been previously validated with a mixed methodological approach based on the use of experts, cognitive interviews and a pilot survey. In the end, we can summarize the main results explaining that our Spanish senior students are very different from the extended idea of digital natives. By the opposite, the majority of them are traditional students who prefer common agendas of paper, make notes on paper and use the Internet overall to search but not to create or share.