A first-year graduate course on the History of Telecommunications was formally incorporated into the School of Telecommunications Engineering at Technical University of Madrid in the year 2005. This course is intended for students who had completed an undergraduate degree in engineering, no matter if they are actually electrical engineers or not.

At that time, the key issue with this type of course was whether it could become attractive and interesting for engineering students, who are usually more used to learning scientific and technical subjects instead of social and humanistic ones.

The first goal was to make the subject easy to follow for all the students, even for non-electrical engineers. As a second goal, it was considered to use a teaching methodology based on non-traditional methods, such us a blended learning one, in order to let students follow the lessons by their own. And as a final goal, it was expected the students had a proactive attitude towards the study of this discipline, challenge which was faced by using an active learning point of view.

The study program for this course was designed to meet all these goals and it contains the next four parts: lecture sessions, patent discussion sessions, one book reading and one visit to a museum. These activities are programmed in a first semester graduate course and they are all carried out with the assistance of the well-known Moodle Learning Management System. This educative platform makes possible to create and share a wide variety of study materials. It also allows the teacher to follow students’ progress and for all students to work at a different pace.

The talk will include a description of the course activities aforementioned and how Moodle encourages students to carry out the course assignments by using an active learning approach. The current project status will be reported and the evaluation methodology applied besides the academic results obtained by the students will be presented.