How to change university students' learning strategies when adapting methodology to the European Higher Education Area?

This study began with an initial quantitative phase, in the 2005/2006 course, where data were collected on two occasions, before initiating and after finalizing the course, with the intention of determining the changes in learning strategies and motivation of students. During the following course, 2006/2007, various changes occurred as a result of adaptation to the educational changes brought about by entry into the new European Higher Education Area. Important among these is the adoption of the WebCT platform to support teaching, alongside this new teaching methods were incorporated such as tasks which are more collaborative, thought provoking and likely to encourage discussion. Again during this second year we collected data relating to the different learning strategies and motivation of first year trainee teachers and the changes in these. Findings were significant with regards to the increase in factors such as: the importance placed, by the students, upon the tasks carried out; their critical thinking, and importantly there was a decrease in the use of rote learning. In the search for realistic explanations a second qualitative phase was began, where these changes were interpret with the help of the program NVIVO. These findings suggest that the key factors of the change were: the introduction of the web as an aid to face to face teaching, the move from individualistic methods to a fostering of collaborative work and in the move away from assessing students work in one final assessment to continual ongoing assessment.