PROBLEM BASED LEARNING AND INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES

The renewal process in which the Spanish University is engaged is motivated mainly by the creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), that is a level of integration and cooperation of European universities with the aim of creating a unified scenario of education levels across the continent.
The spirit of the new educational framework seeks, among others, to motivate students and tries to engage them in a learning process based on the autonomous search of knowledge. For this, the teacher must go beyond mere conduit for bringing its experience: learning to learn, teach to look; induce scientific curiosity, teach to discern and interpret the results... Addressing all of these goals seems to imply the need for substantial changes in traditional teaching methodology, incorporating other more novel based on active student participation in teaching-learning process, fostering collaborative work and resolution of real cases.
This requires the incorporation of new educational tools that make the teaching-learning process easier. The widespread use of ICT, the creation of learning platforms in the network and the implementation of new learning methods based on promoting collaborative work and in solving real problems are the general trend of this new enviroment.
In this paper we examine how the use of the virtual learning platform created by the University of Málaga (Spain) may facilitate the implementation of these learning methodologies, focusing, mainly, on the Problem Based Learning (PBL).