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Technological environment at the University of Zaragoza

21 一月, 2016 - 14:46

A great percentage of the educational activities in the University of Zaragoza is supported on Web technological platforms, known as Learning Management System (LMS), used to create, distribute and manage educational material. These platforms are excellent tools in order to facilitate the development of teaching-learning environments as they support the creation and management of a complete educational model. In fact, they provide repositories of materials, communication tools, monitoring and evaluation tools, collaboration systems, management of different roles involved in the teaching-learning activities and different kinds of permissions and licenses, etc.

From our point of view, a virtual learning environment or virtual campus must be considered beyond the idea of simple “distance learning" as it must integrate many factors, such as technology, services, assessment, educational contents and particularly human factors (students, teachers and other staff involved). Moreover, it must be focused on the online learning process and not just on technological aspects. According to this idea, as a starting point we consider the definition of e-Learning from the perspective of quality of learning by García Pe ́nalvo (García-Peñalvo, 2008): Teaching-learning process, aimed at acquiring a set of competencies and skills by the student, characterized by: 1) the use of web-based technologies, 2) the sequencing of a set of structured contents according to predefined and flexible strategies, 3) the interaction with the network of students and tutors, and 4) a set of appropriate assessment mechanisms for both the learning outcomes and the training intervention as a whole, in a collaborative working environment enriched by a set of value-added services that technology can provide to achieve maximum interaction, and where the presence is not immediate but deferred in space and time. García Pe ́nalve considers that this ensures the highest quality in the teaching-learning process.

At the time of writing this chapter (July 2011), the University of Zaragoza offers Moodle 1.9, Blackboard CE8 and Blackboard 9.1. Moreover, previous courses in Blackboard CE8 are being migrated to Blackboard 9.1. These platforms host 5,675 online courses which involve 4,056 academics and 64,897 users with the role of student. In Figure 7.1, we can observe the evolution of the number of courses in the last four years.

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Figure 7.1 Evolution of the number of online courses at the University of Zaragoza since 2007 

Nevertheless, there exist different uses of these tools in our university. Most courses use them as a support or as a supplement to teaching-learning activities performed in the face-to-face environment. However, there also exists an important percentage of courses where a more advanced model of mixed or hybrid learning called b-learning is used. In this case, tools are used to supplement or even to develop the lectures at school. Thus, this model is used to design teaching-learning scenarios including simultaneous synchronous classroom activities and other asynchronous activities commonly used in e-learning. Finally, an increasing percentage of courses are being completely developed in a virtual environment where the teaching-learning model is completely asynchronous, as generally this kind of courses are included in masters and specialized programs where it is very important to leverage the ubiquity in order to create inter-university collaboration with other national and international universities. In this way, a scenario and strategic framework to internationalize our university is being built. However, on this regard, it is important to emphasize that a wide range of academic and legal aspects need to be considered and their complexity increases with the number of countries involved.

In summary, in the University of Zaragoza, the tools are used in teaching-learning activities by considering b-learning methodologies promoting the design of active learning scenarios and collaborative learning. Moreover, this fact also facilitates the continuous assessment and fosters not only the acquisition of specific knowledge, but also the development of attitudes and skills. However, we also find that a great percentage of the students still have a passive attitude towards LMS and that they consider them as mere repositories. This is sometimes aggravated by the limited use of this kind of tools by a number of academics and it must be overcome.

In any case, these tools are a suitable means for selecting teaching-learning resources and encourage interdisciplinarity. Besides, we can affirm that the use of current platforms increases the value of indicators used commonly to evaluate the quality for the integration of methodologies and information and communication technologies, such as active learning, the improvement of student’s achievement, the improvement of communication among students and teachers, the promotion of coordination among academics, and the improvement of the quality of the contents.

On the other hand, from the experience of using the different platforms, we know that there are certain shortcomings related to the management of contents to enable, for example, reusing or sharing them collaboratively, especially in the university context. In this sense, Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS) are based on a model of content objects or learning objects, which facilitates the management of the repository and the reuse of such objects. Besides, they provide authoring tools or collaborative tools to create them. Moreover, the most modern platforms also incorporate the philosophy of Web 2.0 (Weber & Rech, 2010), as it happens with the latest releases of the platforms currently available at the University of Zaragoza, in particular Blackboard 9.1.

Alternatively, there are specialized platforms such as Document Management Systems (DMS) or systems oriented to Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW). In our university, we have the experience of several groups working with BSCW as a platform for collaborative work. The good results obtained with this platform have encouraged its use and demand by other professors. However, currently, in our institution the workload of the collaborative work can only be performed with Blackboard 9.1.

Regarding open educational resources, we consider that it is interesting to distinguish different elements: 1) contents included in courses with open access, 2) open source development tools and open standards, and 3) tools to create flexible licenses that enable flexible reuse of educational activities. At this point, we consider that legal aspects about the access and the distribution of information are essential. Besides, we have to take into account the new formats and interfaces provided by some emerging distribution channels such as university TV channels, iTunes U, youtubeEDU, etc.

Open or free-access projects in the context of e-learning are widely disseminated and they serve as excellent “showcase" for the promotion of educational institutions, and even for the work of their research groups. In our case, they enhance the dissemination primarily among the hispanic-culture institutions. Thus, for example, the University of Zaragoza has recently incorporated to the Open Course Ware Project (OCW).