The University Carlos III of Madrid introduced, in 1989, the Library and Information Science Degree, and five years later supplemented it with the Bachelor of Documentation. Initially, these studies were taught in Getafe’s Campus, but given the high number of applicants, in 2002, both programmes started to be delivered also at Colmenarejo’s Campus.
Nevertheless, in the following years, the demand of the studies started to go down. This decrease together with the increasing potential market of active professionals without this specific qualifications, leaded the Library and Information Science (LIS) Department to start a new plan of action: to transform the offer in the Colmenarejo Campus into a blended learning model, combining e-learning with some traditional lecturers.
In order to start up this blended model, the management of both qualifications was entrusted to a Pedagogical Coordination Team (ECP), composed by a group of LIS Department assistant professors. The initial aim was to offer the students the possibility to choose their own learning option: either basing their course activity merely on the digital resources (learning materials, activities, communication tools) offered through the e-learning platform, Moodle, or also attending to traditional lessons, tutor appointments, conferences and other programmed activities, suitable to those students who could come regularly to campus. Moreover, most of the traditional lectures were recorded on video and added to the e-learning platform.
The ECP, with the approval of the LIS Department Board, designed a pedagogical model, with several basic rules: assignment of each subject to two teachers; prioritization of student attention; promotion of the continuous assessment, according to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) teaching model, maintaining a constant tracking of the student progress and reducing the relative value of the final exam; holistic control of every model’s aspect by the ECP; stimulating the participants communication by means of the e-learning platform; and finally, the straight collaboration with all the university services involved in these studies.
The start up of these studies required a special effort from both teachers and students. The first had to face several challenges, mainly related with the adaptation of master classes and activities to an e-learning model, based on accurate learning objects, which has required an special support from ECP (training sessions and continuous support during the course); and the replacement of conventional exams by on-line evaluation assessment tools. Besides, the communication process between teachers and students has changed substantially: the classroom questions and answers have been replaced by forums where teachers and students can express themselves.
The election of the e-learning platform has been a key factor. Moodle has proved to be a friendly, easy configuration tool, adaptable to the designed model and to the different user profiles.
The satisfaction of all the agents (teachers, students and university's administration) has shown the benefits of the change, the model’s viability and the suitability of e-learning platforms in university environments. Even thought, several questions have arisen and they need to be analyzed and confronted in the future: the remarkably increase of teacher’s work or the extension, in the coming year, to the new Information and Documentation Degree, adapted to the EHEA.