Abstract:

European Higher Education Area (EHEA) guidelines are promoting the modernization of the universities all over Europe, focusing on creating more comparable, compatible and coherent systems of higher education in Europe. The EHEA offers the Universities the opportunity of, not only redesigning the study plans, but also enhancing the learning process with the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). ICTs offer us a wide range of possibilities to generate new teaching methodologies, materials, etc. Sometimes, the difficulties of students and teachers to get familiar with ICTs applications are barriers to the introduction of these technologies. In particular, students prefer those ICT tools that they daily use in their leisure time (e.g. Social Networks, blogs, wikis), instead of those specifically designed as learning platforms (e.g. Moodle or Caroline).
Since 2002, the Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena (UPCT) uses the Learning Management System Moodle as support teaching tool. This tool is widely used by teachers, but is not well accepted by students. This led, in 2009, the authors of this work developed a pilot in Facebook (a Facebook page), linked to Twitter, to support teaching of a compulsory subject of Telematics Engineering degree. After three years of pilot, results showed that the use of this platform by students was a success. Students were more interested in the information the teacher publishes on the page, the site was visited regularly, and all teaching information (explanatory videos, reporting notes, etc.) were displayed quite frequency.
In order not to neglect the use of Moodle and to provide students an unique environment to access all the information of the subject, this work addresses the integration of the social network Facebook and the Learning Management System Moodle used in UPCT. This will permit students can associate their Facebook account with their Moodle account and they may also use their Facebook account to log into Moodle, and Teachers can add a Facebook live Stream Box as an activity in a course. Any post made to Facebook from Moodle will automatically include a link back to the Moodle site, extending the social connections created within Moodle.

Keywords:

EHEA, ICTs, social networks, LMS.