The fast expansion of digital media has been a shock for institutions where future communicators are being trained. The accelerated rhythm that technology has given all social activities has left communication degrees - both in Europe and Latin America - quite out of sync with reality: some of them where born two or three decades ago, and they were projects that had in mind a type of professional and a labour market that are now endangered species.
In this context, digital content has been randomly incorporated in traditional communication degrees, without really defining the competences that the digital society demands. Digitalism, in this sense, currently enters degrees in the form of a subject at the end of the training path ("Digital Journalism", "Multimedia Communication", etc.). Reality shows that there is no non-digital media anymore: all communication professionals work in an environment that has a strong technological content that affects his/her productive routines, regardless of the final product (newspaper, radio, web, TV, etc.). On the same level, digital content has to be integrated into study programmes in their entire structure, without being relegated to the last years of the degrees.
Keeping this in mind, the project developed by the Red Iberoamericana de Comunicación Digital (ICOD Network) aims to find specific answers that accelerate communication degrees adapting to the new digital reality.
In the specific case of universities where communication degrees have been created recently, the active participation in the project has allowed them to gain the accumulated experience of other institutions of the communication sector, and to shape study programmes according to the new digital reality.
