Still far from personal learning: Key aspects and emergent topics about how future professionals’ PLEs are
The CAPPLE project is an exploratory research project that aims to analyse the PLEs of future Spanish professionals. An ad-hoc survey about their habits for learning was conducted using a sample of 2054 university students from the last year of a degree. After data collection, two main processes were carried out: (1) the analysis of some of the aspects learnt through the data collection; and (2) a series of focus groups in parallel, centered on the exploration of data to obtain some first conclusions with a descriptive analysis. The results of these processes showed firstly, that although the survey size is important, there are other factors to consider, such as the difficulty and constant engagement of questions, which that seriously affected the rate of survey completion. Additionally, data show that future professionals prefer to use analogical tools to complete their learning tasks although they like being connected to social networks in their social lives. They do not have many strategies to organize their learning and are not very critical of the information that comes from their teachers. Regarding PLEs, there are some topics that emerge from the analysis that should be studied in the next future in order to understand better how our students – our future professionals- learn.
