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University level education in Audiovisual Communication was implemented in Spain in 1971 when the Ministry of Education and Science approved the first Faculties of Information Sciences at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and Universidad de Navarra.

Until that time, the educational benchmarks in communication -though not specifically in the audiovisual field- were represented by the School of Journalism of El Debate (1926) and la Escuela Oficial de Periodismo, the Official School of Journalism (1941), which were dependent on the National Delegation of Press and Propaganda. After these, the thematically closer Official School of Cinematography and the Official School of Broadcasting and Television later emerged (Jones, 1998).

In the new faculties, the audiovisual area was not an independent discipline, but rather it was part of one of the three branches of Information Sciences: Journalism, Visual and Auditory Image Science, and Advertising and Public Relations. It would be Organic Law 11/1983 of August 25th that would establish the first step for the division of the disciplines into three degree programmes, and Royal Decree 1427/1991 of August 30th, finally authorized the Degree in Audiovisual Communication. From 1993 onward, various universities incorporated this curriculum into their academic offering: this is the case of the University of Valencia-Estudi General and the Pompeu Fabra University, followed by the University of Salamanca and Ramón Llull in 1994, SEK University in 1997, and the universities of Nebrija, San Pablo CEU and Barcelona in 1998.

Education in this area faced a new adaptation in 2007 when the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) came into effect, which involved the redesign of the structure of degrees into three levels (degree, master’s degree, and doctorate), the introduction of ECTS as a homogenous teaching unit load, and the reduction of the educational period from five to four years. With regard to the audiovisual sector, the universities had to face new challenges, which as Alberich, Guarinos and Mañas (2009) point out, implied positioning the university as the main professional training centre of the industry and thus contributing to the improvement of labour market conditions, which favoured the interweaving of teaching and research to support this discipline academically.

In this phase of creation and renovation of the academic offer in Audiovisual Communication, the Libro Blanco de los Títulos de Grado en Comunicación (White Paper of Communication Degrees) (ANECA, 2005: 227-228) defined four professional categories as resulting from the acquisition of the title: 1) director, screenwriter and audiovisual producer; 2) producer and audiovisual manager; 3) production design and visual/sound postproduction; 4) researcher, teacher and expert in visual studies.

This reduced range aroused some critical voices that observed a poor and not very up-to-date competency record with regard to the reality of the sector (Bartolomé and Aiello, 2006). In fact, the Sectorial Training Board for Employment in the Audiovisual Sector (Mesa sectorial de formación para el empleo del sector audiovisual), promoted by the Employment Barometer of the City of Madrid (2010), maintained that even in the middle of the analogue era, 44% of employers questioned warned of the need for training, and 22% observed a deficit of professionals prepared for the challenges of the moment.

The ongoing consolidation of the digital consumption and production environment has exacerbated this lack of concordance between university education and the work requirement of the environment. Besalú-Casademont, Schena and Sánchez-Sánchez (2017) explain that there is a wide range of opinions on the competencies that an Audiovisual Communication professional should acquire, and for this reason it would be advisable to focus the debate on whether the university has to