BLENDED LEARNING FOR TEACHING THE DESIGN OF COLLABORATIVE WORK SPACES IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Blended Learning is one of the recent trends used in Higher Education. It mainly consists in using face to face classrooms with web resources. Several studies have indicated successful experiences in the use of this trend in Higher Education. Currently, the use of collaboration is a great feature required for nowadays professionals. Therefore, the collaboration competence has to be also a key feature in Higher Education. Indeed, there are subjects which require that students acquire abilities for designing collaborative work spaces and organizing the information for a teamwork. The teaching of designing collaborative work spaces via using collaborative systems can be a difficult task, especially when students have not good skills with computer applications.

There exists a wide range of web tools which allows teachers communicate with students. The most used tools in the educational experiences are Wikis, Blogs, Discussions or Forums. Apart from these collaborative tools, the usage of videos has been employed in several educational experiences to improve the learning process.

The main aim of this paper is to present an experience of using blended learning for teaching students to design and organize collaborative work spaces using a web tool, and providing different kinds of web resources for supporting the learning of this tool. In addition, this paper will present and discuss the evaluation of students about this experience. More precisely this experience has been carried out with the students of a subject entitled “Collaborative Environments for Information Management” in the fifth course of the Librarianship degree at the University of Murcia. Among the objectives of this subject I highlight the followings: the ability of collaborating, managing Document Management Systems (DMS), designing spaces for the collaborative work of a team and using the proper collaborative system for communication.

For carrying out the teaching of the web system for DMS, I have plan the blended strategy with face to face sessions for using the collaborative systems for DMS and some others face to face classes for describing this system and for designing some examples of work spaces. Moreover, students can review and read things by means of web resources which explain the DMS tool and some examples, by using text, discussions and videos.

The evaluation of the students consists in designing in groups a work space, attending to a case study. Moreover, this work is divided in several assignments in order to give feedback to the students about their progress. Once the students finished the assignments they filled a questionnaire about their experience and satisfaction of the blended learning methodology.