AN EXPERIENCE IN BLENDED LEARNING WITH INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS AT ETSEM, IN MADRID

When we decided to include some changes in our online course about the history of the city of Madrid in the year 2014 to adapt it to international students, in English and as a blended learning course, we started an experience which have changed our view on how to approach a distance learning subject. It allowed us to avoid one of the most common mistakes pointed out by experts when using these new technologies for university courses: academic lectures with reduced personal contact with the students and between them. Group interaction is an essential part of the process and transforms completely the meaning of learning as explained in this article.

When travelling to another country attending a university as an international student, it is sometimes hard to relate with others, especially in the first days. Designing a learning environment to promote an easier integration of culturally diverse students was one of our main objectives.The experience and results presented here has been done with groups of 25-30 International students coming to our Building Construction School of Engineering at Madrid Polytechnic University in the last three years.

In engineering studies in Spain if the subject is integrated in curricula, the need to grade students is very often a problem for online courses: it is difficult to establish who has passed the exams, often very simple multiple choice tests. The blended learning possibility gives us a better system but, as we will explain, do not solve to our entire satisfaction some of the problems facing us for grading students, some of them with so different cultural values and learning practices in their universities.