E-LEARNING AS A COMPLEMENT FOR UNIVERSITY TEACHING

The University of Vigo has been running a program to promote the e-learning for the undergraduate and graduate students since 2003. Professors can use the e-learning platform called “claroline” as an additional tool for the courses they teach. Although “claroline” is a web platform for e-learning and collaborative work and it was designed for the e-learning courses, it is commonly used as a complement of the traditional University teaching. “Claroline” provides a new virtual environment for the university teaching with a lot of possibilities. The main feature of the e-learning is the availability of the teaching material on the Internet with no limitations of time and space. So that, the students can access easily at any time to the teaching material, exercises or evaluation. Furthermore, the wifi internet access provides a fast and secure access to the platform from any place in the University Campus. However, it is not easy to start using an e-learning platform due to the important differences between the traditional teaching and the e-learning. For instance, it is necessary to create new teaching material in HTML format, since the pdf files or powerpoint presentations are not the best way to present the teaching material on the web platform. Once the Professors adapted to the new environment, it is expected that the combination of the e-learning and the traditional University teaching provides a better training and skills to the students and improves the general quality of the university teaching.