I used to teach two Computer Applications courses, one introductory beginner course and one advanced. Each course covered a variety of software applications for presentations, word processing, databases, spreadsheets, desktop publishing, vector graphics drawing, audio recording, video recording, and a few others.
Usually assignments were projects and students would turn in most of their projects via Moodle Assignment. Audio and video projects were submitted via the Pcast plugin. The beginners course students would finish the year by creating a portfolio of all their work using eXe. Each assignment had step-by-step directions using Book resources, and students worked at their own pace with a deadline. Students who beat the deadline got to do "fun" stuff bonus work.
Advanced students, using what they learned the year before, would create a monthly school newspaper, and a portfolio of their work for the year, again using eXe. They also worked on adding to a narration script about school events each week. At the end of the year, using their script and videos made throughout the year, they each made a video broadcast of the school highlights for the year. As a final step, they added close captions to the video.
The softskills you mention were very important to the advanced students in being able to produce the newspaper, their scripts, and their videos.