Abstract:

Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) have been widely used in different levels of formal education as a complement to the face-to-face classrooms. During the period 2020-2022 pandemic global situation binded most of the courses to migrate, at least as a digital repository, to VLE. It is widely known that VLE offers an enormous amount of resources. However, most of the time they are underused.

In the present work we describe the design of a mandatory massive Basic Physics Course (BPC) for Agriculture Engineering degree (AE) completely created in a VLE format. We also analyzed the impact that optionals tasks have had in final students' results.

The study was developed in Universidad de la República, Uruguay, between 2020 and 2021. The BPC was first introduced in the AE in the year 2020, due to a curriculum change. It is a semiannual first year course and it has no prerequisites. The student enrollment is about 350 distributed in two university headquarters (420km away): 250 corresponds to the capital headquarters (MVD) and 100 to the inland one (SLT), making the BPC a massive course. The ratio student/teacher was 175 in 2020 and 87 in 2021. Teachers were all located in the MVD headquarters. The BPC syllabus is centered in classical mechanics and it was designed in Moodle, an open source VLE. The course architecture was developed in separate blocks. In the top one we offer course general information (teachers, schedule, suggestions for studying physics, approval rules, ad-forums). In subsequent blocks we include the different areas of the syllabus, all of them in the same format. Depending on the course edition, some differences in the syllabus block could be found. Their commonalities were that each topic has their specific schedule in the beginning of the block, we offer some audiovisual resources explaining the key concepts, references for further reading, list of exercises with answers and some solved solutions, a blog-like forum and a self-assessment quiz (SAQ). In the BPC first edition we listed the resources and activities. Meanwhile, in the 2021 edition we use the resource “book” to organize the activities. Each chapter of the Moodle book contained the main topics in the unit (ie: unit: cinematics; chapters: particle, 1D cinematics, 2D cinematics, rigid body), whereas subsections offered a variety of resources (text, videos, teacher’s explanations, exercises and problems, teacher’s resolution of problems, tasks, proposals to discuss in the forum, SAQ). We found that the book-like architecture was clearer and more organized for both teachers and students. Students also qualified the use of VLE in the top quartile, highlighting comments such as “recorded classes help me to review concepts at any moment”, “we have a big variety of tests”, “there were lots of resources so you get engaged”. Surveys also showed two common perceptions between students: teachers were always present and the course was very well organized. When we correlated the students' performance with their participation in the SAQ (it was a common non mandatory resource between both editions of the course) we found that those students who obtained the highest score in the midterm tests had achieved at least one SAQ.

Keywords:

Virtual Learning Environments, Basic Physics Course, Agronomic Engineering.