The management of distance education activities in the Politehnica University of Timisoara have different aspects and requires several development instances. Recently, the online development included also tools needed for human resources management and time management. Politehnica University of Timisoara uses, since 2009, the university Virtual Campus CVUPT, a Moodle based development. As many of Moodle instances are used in distance education settings, where activities happen also face-to-face in university labs, any off-platform relevant activities need to be reported and quantified manually. This is especially important in our university educational setting, where reported activity affects many teaching/learning indicators, including the academic staff' time reports. In order to properly mitigate this situation, we have developed a tool allowing Moodle integration with the official reporting procedure used by the academic staff from the distance education courses in our University. In this paper, we present the new methodology, the development process as well as the initial evaluation, by comparing the process of obtaining results from offline, previous form-based reports submitted in the past, with those obtained using the online tool in CVUPT. The evaluation run by the eLearning Center team revealed important feedback on time management, that will generate more change, many updates and other adaptations of the reporting tool in CVUPT. We can conclude that, for its first iteration, the online reporting tool was seen as a positive development, conducted to better time management of the distance education academic staff. Several proposed improvements are already in plan for the second development.
Admitting the increasing interest for education delivered by the means of technology is relevant if we consider all the aspects, including features related to gender. Several studies point out that women and men differ in their way of interacting with technology, ICT being traditionally associated with men [1]. In the context of blended learning settings, there are several existing gender differences, which means a statistical analysis focused on differences between men and women users of the Virtual Campus platform is needed. The main objective of this study is to provide evidence of significant gender differences in the effect of using certain platform tools by both genders. A subsequent objective is to test if the efficiency of both manners of working with e-learning tools eventually converge around similar results (in case the results point to scarce differences). The research was conducted by looking at the final number of students following the Distance Learning program run by the eLearning Center at UPT, during the first semester of the academic year 2017-2018. Distance learning students enrolled at Politehnica University Timisoara are mostly digital natives, consumers of technology in order to support the teaching and learning processes. The aim of this paper is to analyze the gender differences in using the platform, based on the students' online activity statistics from Moodle and all the resulting data.
The e-Learning became a trend that continues to grow as importance, complementing the classical/traditional classroom. Students' opinion is important in designing an open course, in the way they perceive their activities and especially related to the practical part. The objective is to analyse how to create a course including a list of desired technologies that would increase their interest. It was noted from their proposal, the interest for open educational resources and the need to have a wide variety of ways of presenting the subjects of study. The need for greater interactivity, collaborative projects and the presence of self-evaluation tests has been very clearly underlined. This analysis provides report statistics about the type of courses developed, the number of activities on LMS for each 3-hour classical teaching, the number of activities on LMS for one course, the type of resources and activities to be exploited by tutors. An increased interest about the students` attention was upon the possibility of including many external media resources. The most important aspect observed by analysing the courses was the fact that at least three external open educational resources were desired to be included in a three hours classical teaching class to complement the traditional printed material. All the materials produced and selected by the students had a high qualitative standard. A close attention was paid to the interactive potential of a resource. Considering the findings of this study, further actions can be taken, such as: centralizing the outcomes, presenting it to the decision factors from the University management board, proposing a strategy/ a general guideline for all the tutors of the University.
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