i. Objectives

The next implantation of European credits system ECTS entails a trend to incorporate autonomous and guided work from students, linked to semipresentiality (blended learning) in teaching of university degrees (Colás, 2005). The realisation of group assignments requires from a good organisation of their members to be efficient on putting the information of the work in common, to argue and to solve doubts, to elaborate summaries... At present, there are not many accessible tools to enhance this kind of interaction among students or among teaching staff when they have difficulties to meet in person as frequently as desired. And many of the computer tools that exist and might be used aren't either localized to our language, or they are just proprietary software (regardless of the price you'd have to pay to get them), which does mean (or may very well mean in the mid run), among other issues, that it would be too expensive to use and improve to the budget of the public educative centers.

And beyond the specific computer tools to be used, new methodologies of group work are needed to enhance the "cooperative learning" (Johnson & Johnson 1986), and to promote cooperation more than simple competition while doing assessments.

Thus, our main goal was to test ways to improve the efficiency of students making group work (in fact, cooperative learning), diminishing the ratio of number of hours dedicated respect to the final quality assessed in that group work.

We also aimed to improve the quality of tutorship while the evolution of the group assignments from blended-learning activities.

In this first communication, we focus on the qualitative data collected from surveys to students where they could comment in free open fields whatever they thought or felt about their process while completing the requested group assignments. In a further communication (De Pedro et al. 2006) we focus more on the quantitative aspects of their results while performing those group assignments.