Abstract:

The Virtual Classroom is an excellent tool to facilitate interactivity, communication and knowledge application for a certain subject. It results quite helpful to improve the quality and effectiveness of education by using the computer to support a collaborative learning process. By collaborative learning is meant a learning process that emphasizes group or cooperative efforts among faculty and students, active participation and interaction on the part of both students and teachers. This leads to a new knowledge that emerges from an active dialog among those who are sharing ideas and information.
The Virtual Classroom has been used in the optional subject “Environmental Contamination”, given in Pharmacy, La Laguna University, during the academic course 2007/2008. The study was conducted under a funded project. The Virtual Classroom was designed and utilized to supplement magisterial lessons, laboratory practices and seminars as well as field activities. The total timing included a 70% of face-to-face teaching and 30% of Virtual Classroom. The Virtual Classroom was organized to timely include class resources and activities, in concordance with the face-to-face lessons. The mentoring program of the subject included 10 hours in a face-to-face environment and 46.5 hours in the Virtual Classroom. The overall assessment took into account the involvement of the students in the virtual platform.
The platform proved to be ideal to perform an assessment of the working activity of the students, which is quite important for the European Convergence Process, as well as for the new requirements of the today-society. Moreover, it was observed that students highly involved in the Virtual Classroom experienced a higher motivation for the subject.
This work shows the obtained results through the application of the virtual classroom and the extent of the involvement of the students, the utilization of the resources and their success with the virtual activities and the overall subject.

Keywords:

virtual classroom, student s involvement, student s motivation.