PROBLEM BASED LEARNING AND INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES

The renewal process in which the Spanish University is engaged is motivated mainly by the creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) that is a level of integration and cooperation of European universities with the aim of creating a unified scenario of education levels across the continent. The spirit of the new educational framework seeks, among other objectives, to motivate students and to try to engage them in a learning process based on the autonomous search of knowledge. For this purpose, the lecturer must go beyond the mere transmissions of contents; he must also use his experience in order to: teach how to learn; teach what to look for; induce scientific curiosity; teach to discern and interpret the results ... In order to address all of these goals we need the substantial changes in traditional teaching methodology, incorporating new methods based on active student participation in teaching-learning process, fostering collaborative work and resolving the real problematic cases. This requires the incorporation of new educational tools which make the teaching-learning process easier. The widespread use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), the creation of learning platforms in the network and the implementation of new learning methods based on the promotion of collaborative work and the solution of real problems are the general trends of this new environment. In this study we examine how the use of the virtual learning platform created by the University of Malaga (Spain) may facilitate the implementation of these learning methodologies, focusing, mainly, on the Problem-Based Learning (PBL).