DISTANCE LEARNING MINI-PROJECT “A distance course

DISTANCE LEARNING
MINI-PROJECT
“A distance course in Dokeos”
César López Ramírez 100032792
Javier Jiménez Dorado 100033052
Introduction
We have done this mini-project providing a distance – learning environment for the
Humanities course “Development Cooperation Introduction”. It is a course that it is followed by 1020 students every first semester in UC3M. It is an important course because the distance learning
tools works better with a small group of students, at least without an important work load to the
teacher.
The most important fact we took under consideration is to offer, at least, the same options than
in the presential course. However, with Dokeos and small care, we can get much more options and
facilities, for teacher and for student.
Students can follow the topics step by step or in base to their needed thanks to learning path. It
is recommended in the description of the course, to make tests in order to fixed concepts. The idea is
to have a small test for each lesson trying to remark the most important ideas, and at the end of each
chapter, another test, evaluable or not, where student relate concepts, ideas, problems and solutions.
Here it is more important what they can do than what they know.
Critical thinking can be developed by means of forums and chats. Both tools are very usefull
and similar to presential discussion. The only problem is that there is not speech training. However it
is often to there be more and different ideas.
Personal tutories with teacher can be done by email, chat or if teacher want, by telephone.
It is very important to keep student motivated, to do that a friendly interface is very useful,
and Dokeos does. Beside that, multimedia in tests and even in lessons are a very good system to make
motivate students.
The content of this courses must differ from contents that can be learned by reading a book.
Without forgetting them, the small experience demosntrate that applicated concepts and real cases are
more interesting and, some times, more illustrator than theory.
Thanks to web and their links, we can make the course as big as the student would like to.
With the proper links, references and resources about another courses, topics or cases, the student can
have, almost anything they want to know. However it is important to take care and not to introduce
too many concepts but only, give the way to extend their knoledge.
Course: “Introduction to cooperation development”
In order to make easier the evaluation we have created two users in the course. One is the teacher and
a student, and the other one is only a student.
To get into the course you must introduce loggin and password in the “free campus” of DOKEOS.
Here you have the link and the users and passwords:
Teacher: quismayas
Pass: labsoftcom
User: labsoftcom1
Pass: alumno1
Free campus: http://campus.dokeos.com/index.php
Dokeos resources used
The material that we have implemented are:
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Course description: We describe the general description, objectives, topics, methodology, human
and technical resources linked to the course and assessment process. The more important topic
here is the methodology. The program is focused on competences (what people can do) instead of
contents (what people do). This is a richer environment for the distance learning methodology.
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Learning path. The students can freely choose the order of the units to study them, anyway it is
mandatory to read the introduction units first of all.
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Documents. The original materials of the course and some comments about them.
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Links. We fill them with some examples. It could be better to organize links related to each unit.
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Tests: We have two tests. One with multimedia elements and classical one.
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Diary (to note something, we have added some items for each chapters, stimated timelength and
date for submitting mini-project)
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Announcements ( To announces important dates, conferences, etc)
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Forums: A vital topic. The students can discuss with the teacher about the course's contents and
bring feedback to the course. There are one for every chapter and one more for the mini-project.
Anybody can create a new forum or thread.
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Chats: A positive aspect about Dokeos is that the chat conversation are recorded and can be readed
later by all the students.
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Groups: The student can be divided into workgroups.
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Survey: Useful to know students feelings about the course. The same as the classical surveys but
the teacher can access to the whole information.
Conclusions
We think that these tools based on Dokeos fits very well in this course. Development
Cooperation has a lot of topics open for discussion and it's important that every student can say his
opinion about them.
Also the humanities courses has few of presencial lectures and this environment could be
important to complete them. Applied technology to learning has a long way runned on this kind of
couses since 90's with the project Ada Madrid which are completely distance learning applied with
some videoconference lectures.
With these technologies the number of students could be improved without losing quality of
learning.
At last, forum,chats and announcement can keep the student motivation high all the course's
length.