VIRTUAL CLASSROOM FOR PRACTICAL INTERNET AUTONOMOUS LEARNING: NEW MATERIALS AND COURSE ASSESMENT

The Universitat Jaume I (UJI) has been running a teaching training program for new lecturers since 1999. This program helps them to develop capabilities to integrate themselves better in the teaching staff by planning, developing and assessing their courses. On the other hand, UJI will start in 2010 new graduate studies in Computer Science and Telematics under the framework of the Common European Space in Higher Education (CSHE), where autonomous learning for students is strongly promoted. In order to avoid sudden changes for teaching staff and students, UJI is also promoting gradual changes in the existing courses pre-CHSE to reach most of the main objectives of CSHE.
UJI has helped to accomplish the autonomous learning objective by facilitating the development of a virtual learning environment based on Moodle, but delegating over the teachers the responsibility of adapting existing contents to the autonomous learning of students. This is the case of the Internet Practical Aspects course which aim is to introduce networks concepts and Internet architecture and services. The current course contents and teaching strategies are out of date in relation to CHSE approach.
An educational project was proposed as one of the UJI new lecturers training program activities for 2009-2010. The aim of this project was to review the course virtual classroom running in the Moodle platform, enhancing teaching materials, introducing new autonomous learning resources, new tasks designed for facilitating self-evaluation, and educational strategies for improving students work and responsibility. The project was accepted some months ago and we immediately started working in parallel with the development of the course. Tasks are expected to be finished on June 2010.
We present a running project with partial but promising results. Once the main teaching materials were reviewed, redesigned and elaborated, we introduced the most basic autonomous learning resources and a controlled set of self-evaluation tasks. Then, we started a short and intense test period with the registered students as experiment volunteers. In this phase, we have been monitoring resource operations for detecting design errors, and questioning users about easiness and satisfaction aspects by means of on-line surveys. Finally, the gathered information shows students appreciate the new approach.