Abstract:

Within the context of the new education system in Higher Education, the e-learning is a powerful tool, which is gaining prominence. The use of new technologies of information and communication (ICT) for distance education makes possible that more people can achieve their educational goals. Depending on the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS), the students' personal work is going to be increasingly important. In fact, each European credit is equivalent to 25-30 hours of study in all countries and is used to facilitate transfer and progression throughout the European Union. Thus, virtual education promotes the students take responsibility for their own learning resulting in a proactive and participatory attitude under the guidance of the teacher-tutor. On the other hand, Statistics is a science in which practice with computer is very important, so that people thought learning-teaching in a virtual environment would be very difficult. To achieve theses aims is fundamental to offer suitable material and activities. In this paper, we present the satisfactory learning-teaching experiences in different statistical courses of the virtual Master in Applied Statistic of the University of Granada (Web http://www.ugr.es/~moea/). Each of the courses of this master has four European credits that are equivalent to 100–120 hours of study of the student. The teaching and learning of the contents of these courses are offered by the University of Granada into a virtual learning environment based on an online Moodle platform. It has been developed useful materials and resources, to promote the student’s self-learning and interaction among them. In recent years, Statistic was a degree with few students. Now, with this virtual experience, we are motivating a lot of students learning in a flexible, modern and effective work environment.

For each course the lecturer provides the student different material as theoretical contents, in both PDF and HTML format (SCORM), Didactic guide, examples of real data applications using appropriate statistical software, self-learning tutorials, evaluation activities and other learning resources as real data sets, video conferencing and links to outside resources in libraries and on the Internet. To promote knowledge sharing among professors and students the Moodle platform offers also essential communication tools as a notice board for up-to-date course information, and forum, chat and e-mail to display and solve the different doubts. With intent of encouraging discussion between all participants, some interesting questions are raised by professor.

Keywords:

e-Learning, virtual education, SCORM, ECTS, self-learning tutorials.