Over the last decade, the practice of higher education in Romania has become more diverse and complex, being more and more present in virtual environments. We all know the diversity of MOOCs, the diversity of on-line courses for enrolled students in various academic programs, the existence of learning management systems (LMS) and platforms, but we do not have a clear image of how teaching in digital environments, using those methods and technologies, respond to students` needs. The field of teaching in digital environment is wide and diverse containing many studies and researches on methodologies, principles of learning, characteristics of digital environments, mostly based on personal experiences and students` feedback.
Due to the growing industry of learning technology, the opening of universities toward this technology and mostly the growing need of students for distance learning, e-learning, blended-learning, m-learning, game based learning etc. there is a need to have a framework of how to design courses in digital environments that conduct to qualitative learning. As is well known, the present teaching paradigm is centered on the students` characteristics, but can digital environment support and answer the needs of students? In order to design a course in digital environment knowing the characteristics of students and of the digital environment is important.
This is also, the idea behind the present research which is to investigate how the characteristics of students enrolled in bachelor and master programmes at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences interact with the characteristics of digital environment and the way the results of such interactions conduct to quality learning.
The overarching outcome will be a clearer image on designing classes for virtual environments in which the quality learning takes effect.
Concept maps are an effective way of representing organized knowledge (concepts) in hierarchical fashion regarding a person's understanding of a domain of knowledge. Within our custom developed e-Learning platform it was created a concept map for a chapter of a discipline. The obtained concept map has been used for creation the test and exam questions such that knowledge regarding each concept is tested by a certain number of quizzes. We present the architecture of a decision support system that assesses the accumulated knowledge of students. The architecture's business logic is based on a concept map of a chapter of a discipline. A custom algorithm has been designed and implemented to measure the coverage of the curriculum. The system may be generalized for entire discipline as long as for each chapter is set up a concept map and all other necessary settings.
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