MANAGEMENT OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY TEAMS IN E-LEARNING. A CASE STUDY

This paper describes management issues in the implementation of eLearning in higher education in a Spanish institution. The process has involved the work of multidisciplinary teams with a very different background. Moreover the technological transformation needed was not a smooth process. This transformation involved again the management and coordination of multidisciplinary teams.
The objective of this paper is to present the process-based quality management system applied in this case study in order to make easy the evolution to global and quality eLearning studies, and examine how the application of this academic management processes and models has influenced in the quality of undergraduate education using a student feedback survey to measure client satisfaction.

Introduction:
In the academic year 2010-2011, Universidad Europea de Madrid implemented a hybrid model of higher education called Personal University that allows students to choose what percentage of courses study online, blended and on-site (100% in person). Thereby, every student may choose to study part of their curriculum 100% online, other part blended (attending classes on weekends with a 50% or less of attendance), and the rest 100% in person attending classes from Monday to Friday.

This type of teaching is aimed to working adults that require flexibility and schedules tailored to their professional lives. Other flexibility options offered to the student include the possibility to enroll or to change the enrollment at the beginning of any term (quarter) and the rate of learning according to the time they can devote to their studies (within set limits of minimum and maximum credits to enroll). Furthermore, these studies offer a number of additional customized services according to the profile and qualifications of the student, and a high level of interaction with the University, professors, colleagues and companies through technological services developed for this purpose.

Modifications to the existing systems and processes had to be made in order to implement this model, and also define new ones where none existed. Given the magnitude of the project and the investment required, the implementation of the model has been developed gradually. Thus, during the academic year 2010-11, 9 degree programs were given in online and blended learning study option with a total of 81 courses, 44 professors and 413 students. Today this number has increased to 28 degree programs, 350 courses, more than 700 professors and 6533 students.

In this paper we focus on the organization of the hybrid programs implantation, studying in depth how these models have been developed, how they have been modified putting into practice corrective measures as a result of the monitoring and, finally, how the project has been evaluated in order to identify the areas to be improved as a future work.