Developing 21st-Century Competences in Telecollaborative Projects through Digital Storytelling

Interaction between people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds has never been greater. Advances in technology and the accelerated pace of social, cultural, and economic globalization have increased physical and virtual human mobility worldwide. As a result, higher education is rapidly shaping the culture of universities today by adapting their educational programs to provide graduates with 21st-century education (García-Perez & Rojas-Primus, 2017). As endorsed by United Nation Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO; Nam, 2015), higher education in the 21st century should focus on sustainable development and global citizenship to ensure students acquire the knowledge and skills needed to effectively engage in our global communities. In alignment with this 21st-century educational framework, this chapter aims to explore and compare the development of the following 21st-century competences: language competences, intercultural competences, digital competences, teamwork abilities, and social awareness in students through participating in a telecollaborative digital storytelling project carried out in the Fall of 2017 on students of Intermediate Spanish from Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU, Canada) and students of Upper-Intermediate English for Business from Universitat de València (UV, Spain). Furthermore, this study looks into students’ levels of foreign language anxiety that may arise due to participating in this project.