Abstract:

Peculiarities of University first grade students, specially when compared with upper grade students, is a well-known issue between teachers. These students have to face a knew teaching environment, where their attendance is not usually controlled, interaction with teachers is (or has traditionally been) minimum and other students are considered strange people rather than friends; on top of that, they are not used to ways of teaching and evaluating different from that employed at School and they are overwhelmed by subjects complexity. It is in this context where ICTs are being introduced. Even if its advantages in the teaching-learning process can not be ruled out, they can lead to a more difficult situation for first grade students if employed carelessly.
Some experiences have taken place at the School of Engineers in Bilbao in the last two years with the aim of introducing Moodle platform in the teaching-learning process. One of them is currently being developed in one first-year group for the course of Linear Algebra, which has not yet adopted the ECTS, within a considerably rigid framework: a common syllabus to be taught to several groups by different teachers, masterclasses as the base of the teaching-learning process, scarce or none use of new technologies, a common exam and an homogeneous evaluation of every student performed by the group of teachers and based 95% in a final exam. Within this frame, even a little change need a consensus and putting into practice a new approach to teaching based on or having new technologies as a main tool need previous experiences to be presented and discussed. Thus, the purpose of the experience was to introduce the ICTs to students and to analyse basic points such as the problems that they have to face to use them in their daily academic activity, to analyse their response to Moodle, including the degree of participation and evaluation of every type of material (documents, slides, videos, etc) and to identify real demands of students.
Our preliminary results allow us to consider the experience as very positive as a whole but some black spots have also been detected.

Keywords:

innovation, technology, moodle, icts.