Abstract:

The group 9 of universities (G-9) is a non-profit organization formed by public Spanish universities which are unique in their respective autonomous communities. The University of Castilla-La Mancha is part of the G-9 together with the public universities of Extremadura, La Rioja, Baleares Islands, Oviedo, Zaragoza, Cantabria, Navarra and Basque Country.

The G-9 purpose is promoting the collaboration among the university institutions belonging to the group, by offering Virtual Educational Environments (VEE) to teach several subjects by experts from these universities. Actually, it provides a joint proposal of 87 optative subjects which are classified in four different itineraries:
1. E-business
2. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Education
3. Environment and sustainable development
4. Education, health and social development

The authors of this work form a multidisciplinary group of professors from the Mathematics and Computer Science Departments of the University of Castilla-La Mancha, who impart the subject “Multidisciplinary Tools for Learning Programming and Mathematics in Engineering”, within the second itinerary above.

This subject was first offered in the course 2006/2007, so this is the third edition. In the present course we have fifteen students from different universities.

The subject is entirely taught by using the course management system (CMS) Moodle, which, as is well-known, is a free open source software package designed to help educators create effective online courses. The professors have prepared a complete guide of activities and provided useful teaching materials in order to favour the self-learning of the students.

The main objective of our subject is to know and program some numerical algorithms by using the computational software program Mathematica, widely used in scientific, engineering, mathematical fields and other areas of technical computing. Actually, we have developed a virtual laboratory which allows the students to execute the Mathematica commands in a remote way without installing the software Mathematica.

In this work we show our teaching experience, analyzing in detail the objectives, methodology, use of virtual resources, evaluation and main difficulties in the whole process.

Finally, we provide several conclusions regarding possible improvements for this e-learning experience and its adaptation to the Bologna Process.

Keywords:

e-learning, course management system, computer algebra system.