Abstract:

The competitive world requires excellence in the development or the production of materials and services. In order to develop an online course, it is necessary to produce the educational materials and offer the services and technology to mediate this process. The production of the online courses requires several professionals, such as: Educational Designer (who plans the online course, helps the professors to produce contents and articulates the other stages of the process, such as the development of educational objects), texts revision, audio description, translation into Brazilian Sign Language, diagramming and implementation of the course in the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Furthermore to offer this service, the online tutor works on the VLE and has the role of a mediator and his main function is to be present and help students in the teaching and learning process. This mediation is based on the approach called “Virtual Togetherness” and the present tutors perform face meetings. If we want quality courses, we need to evaluate all this professionals. In this work we analyze data from the Project Sao Paulo Network for Teachers’ Development (REDEFOR) Special and Inclusive Education 2013. This project has offered seven courses in these areas by Sao Paulo University State (Unesp) during the first half of 2014, attended 1600 students and the process was continuously evaluated. During this period, evaluation questionnaires were conducted by sampling. REDEFOR aims to improve the training of teachers and coordinators who work at public schools in São Paulo State, in order to allow them to act in specialized educational services and spread the concept of inclusive education, which ensures the right for education for everyone. The courses are being developed in three modules and the first was the common core into seven courses. The main objective of this work was evaluated the first module of these courses using some Multivariate Statistics Techniques to analyze quantitative and qualitative data. The evaluation was carried out considering five dimensions: (I) Teaching Plan; (II) Educational Material; (III) VLE; (IV) Online Tutors and (V) Tutor. In order to analyze the results, the cluster analysis was performed. Furthermore, the Euclidean distance was used as a similarity measure. According to the analyzed data, the overall satisfaction rate was greater than 90%. On each dimension, the overall satisfaction rate was evaluated by using a multivariate statistical analysis (cluster analysis) that considers simultaneous responses within the dimensions. On the first dimension (I), the overall satisfaction was around 88% and on the second dimension (II) the overall satisfaction was approximately 90%. The evaluation of the third dimension (III) has shown that the overall satisfaction rate increased with time. On the fourth dimension (IV), the overall satisfaction rate has been high since the beginning of the course. The overall satisfaction rate on the fifth dimension (V) was 87% on the first survey and has increased with time. This evaluation process was developed with the experience acquired by the Tutors who work at public schools. In addition to overall satisfaction, the dropout rate was less than 10%. This rate is considered low for an online course. It can be concluded that the development of the course has been carried out with a high overall satisfaction rate, as showed by the relevant statistical analysis practices that were employed.

Keywords:

Statistical evaluation, online course, Virtual Learning Environment, assessibility