Abstract:

E-learning environment offers many opportunities for both teachers and students. Computer assisted learning uses computers to improve the delivery of learning materials, communication among students and teacher and at the same time it can also become a major motivating factor. Interactive activities can shift the focus from a passive, teacher-centered model to one that is active and learner centered, offering a stronger learning stimulus. Interactivity helps to maintain the learner’s interest and provides means for individual practice and reinforcement.
This article deals with the problems of creation of electronic course to support distance students of E-Commerce course, which is intended for two study programs: business administration and informatics. Research problems focus on two main problems; different students' knowledge base of these two study programs and problems in communication necessary for the conduct of the project. As the first group of students finished the course in 2013 we are now able to evaluate the results (positive and negative) and formulate the future of the course.
The main idea of the E-commerce course is to teach students theoretical aspects of e-business and give them fundamental information about the use of e-commerce portals. Nevertheless, this knowledge base would not be enough; students also need to know how to develop business strategy, what legislative requirements have to be met, and how to effectively use Internet data analysis tools.
Theoretical knowledge is very important, as it forms a base, but graduates from the economic faculty should also be able to transfer their knowledge into practice. Thus we included into the course also practical task; the creation of real e-shop. This is a fairly extensive project and therefore we have chosen variant of group work. Group work can be used as an effective tool to help students learn from each other, build community and engage with the course content. Each team handles its own project – e-shop. And here comes the problem in supporting distance learning students and their contact not only with teacher but also with other members of their team. It was necessary to choose such e-learning tool that allows students to not only pass the appropriate course materials, but also communicate with the teacher and between the team members to each other and which currently offers tools to support group work and shared document processing.
The appropriate tool has been chosen, e-learning system Moodle (version 2.5), which offers comfortable tools for communication such as chat or forum, creating a common vocabulary of key terms and wiki for shared document processing. At the same time Moodle offers the possibility of inserting multimedia tutorials and links to other web tutorials, the possibility of testing acquired knowledge from each part of the course.

Keywords:

Distance learning, E-commerce, e-learning, Moodle, Teaching.