Abstract:

The implementation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has requested the modification of the teaching processes in the countries that joined the Bologna Treaty. Within this context, universities have made an effort to adapt to the new teaching requirements accompanying the Bolonia Treaty, developing new technology structures based on information and communication technologies (ICTs), that allow learning anytime and anywhere. In other words, universities have developed different online tools that offer the potential to change the manner of pedagogy and learning traits as well as to open access to millions. However, despite almost all Spanish universities already have an ICT initiative, they have adopted both different information technology strategies based on student´s autonomous learning and very diverse material structuring.

The University of Cantabria (UC), in its commitment to provide the necessary resources to adapt to the learning goals requested by the EHEA implementation, has developed programs offering a range of services, such as Aula Virtual and UC Abierta websites, which gather platforms like Moodle, Blackboard, OCW, and MOOC. These Open Educational Resources (OERs) allow students to get free access to materials of some subjects taught at UC, to use additional documentation of these subjects, as well as to satisfy their curiosity about subjects of general purpose with freedom of time and location. Among the existing platforms for sharing knowledge remotely in UC the most popular are Open Course Ware (OCW) and Moodle. This is justified by a total of 200 and 416 subjects that have created an Open Course project or a Moodle course, respectively, in 2016-2017 academic year. Consequently, these two platforms will be the main object of our analysis.

In this paper, we study an experience with the use of OCW and Moodle platforms in the context of the UC. More specifically, the aim of the paper is to compare students´ perceptions about the level of knowledge and use of these platforms in order to know whether there are differences regarding both aspects, as previous studies have suggested. In order to attain this goal, we have collected data from a sample of students enrolled in the subject "Operations Management", a compulsory subject of 6 ECTS that is taught in the second course of the Degree in Business Administration and Management. This subject was available as a Moodle course from 2011 and as an OCW course in 2013 up to the present.

Three aspects were analysed through a questionnaire survey: 1) students´ profile, 2) level of knowledge and students´ participation in the platform analysed and 3) what use of the existing resources and training materials is being made by students.
The data obtained were analyzed in order to explore differences regarding the usefulness of both platforms from students´ perspective, as well as to provide feedback about the utilities of these tools and suggestions for increasing the effectiveness of the materials that are available within them.

Keywords:

Open Educational Resources, OCW, Moodle, Spain, University of Cantabria, Operations Management.