Blended learning, also known as "semi face-to-face learning", combines on-line learning with conventional learning. According to Maite Martin, this learning has advantages and disadvantages: "For the student it is more appealing, more innovative.It enables him or her to work at home in a way that is similarto that of the classroom. As far as the disadvantages are concerned, the main one is that the student sits in front of a computer, so it is very easy for him or her to get distracted and start doing something else".

The teacher "may lose control of the class a little.Producing a blended learning course is harder than producing a conventional one, but once it has been programmed for one year, it is easier to reuse it.But making the adaptations is very hard work; it is expensive and you have to input your knowledge into the system. Maintaining it is more manageable, but it requires preparation work," stressed the author of the thesis.

The aim of this researcher'sthesis has been to facilitate this learning and she defines the backbone of the study thus: "To create generic tools capable of analysing the interaction between teachers, students and education platforms, to provide teachers and students with automatic feedback."

Martín went on to say: "We have achieved a specific implementation; we have tried it out on UPV/EHU students and lecturers, and we have seen that it provides interesting feedback, it cuts the time taken by the teacher to analyse the data and is useful for everyday work, especially if work is done with a blending of on-line systems and face-to-face classes. This system or architecture (SIgBLE) is abstract, so a specific implementation in specific languages has to be made."

Importance of blended learning
These tools aim to facilitate and improve teaching/learning processes and to automatically monitor that process in shared learning. According to Martín, "this type of learning is no longer optional; one cannot opt for it or not. The new technologies have burst onto the scene with such force that youngsters are used to working with more systems. They find ‘the traditional class' excruciatingly boring. Blended learning is here to stay, and we have to learn to manage it and make it beneficial for everyone, not just to have fun."

As far as the future of this type of learning is concerned, "it will have an increasing presence in all educational environments. What I don't know is whether we will be able to improve the results. The same thing happens when one changes from one education system to another: when everything changes, it is difficult to know what has a positive influence and what does not," concluded the researcher.

Additional information
Maite Martín-Roldán (Donostia-San Sebastian, 1977), author of the thesis Análisis de interacciones de aprendizaje y generación de avisos multiusuario en entornos combinados, el aprendizaje combinado (blended-learning) (Analysis of learning interactions and generation of multi-user alerts in blended environments –blended learning) is a Doctor of Computer Engineering. She wrote up her thesis at the Computing Faculty in Donostia-San Sebastian in the GaLan research group, except for one part that she did during a period of time spentwith the Open Learner Group of the Department of Electronic, Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Birmingham. Her thesis supervisor was Prof Isabel Fernández de Castro.