Abstract:

The paper focuses on student’s feed-back on a basic IT course, taught in the first year of the BA level. The course covers basic IT and Internet services functioning principles, as well as the most important moments in IT evolution. The course combines classical teaching methods with interactive methods and e-learning tools. The evaluation is performed along the academic years 2016-2017 and 2017-2018.

We briefly describe the content of the course and the electronic educational resources that we have used and their learning impact; consequent to this description, we focus on students’ feed-back towards the course. The responses have been collected and processed with the official UBB teacher evaluation tool, which is included in AcademicInfo information system. The quiz evaluates both the course and the seminar (the practical activity).

The educational material has been prepared and provided within UBBonline e-learning platform. Main course topics are structured on: IT basic concepts, computer types, computer architecture, operating systems, computer networks, Internet evolution, Internet connection and addressing, Internet security, e-mail, World Wide Web, Web 2.0, multimedia in the Internet and Internet social impact.

The educational e-learning tools have been prepared on the UBBonline educational structure, containing: a modular e-learning resource with educational goals and resources for each topic, discussions, tasks, communication facilities: e-mail and chat. Practical assignments include a site and a blog; they are graded during the semester and their grades are included, together with the grade for the theoretical quiz, with equal weights, in the final exam grade.

We also analyze the results obtained by students in the exams along the 2 academic years that we have mentioned, discussing the results of the theoretical quiz and the practical grades.

Using UBB’s teacher evaluation tool, students have graded the course with an average around 4, on a scale 1-5, where 1 is very poor and 5 is very good. We also compare the results with the ones obtained using our own course evaluation quiz, which was created on UBBonline portal, using the portal’s built in facilities (this type of feed-back was previously researched). Students express a positive feed-back towards the course content, the acquired knowledge and interactive teaching methods, and an overall good to very good rating of the course

Keywords:

Basic IT course, student feed-back, teaching IT concepts, interactive educational resources UBBonline e-learning portal.