Abstract:

Since 2003, the University of Vigo has been running a program to promote the e-learning for undergraduate and graduate courses. Professors can use the e-learning platform Claroline as a complement for their own courses. Claroline is an open source e-learning and e-working platform allowing teachers to build effective online courses and to manage learning and collaborative activities on the web. This manuscript presents the virtualization of a course in environmental engineering as a complement to the traditional teaching for the students of Industrial Engineering. In the very beginning, the platform was used to upload complementary teaching materials for the classes. These materials comprises tables, figures, list of exercises,… and brief monographs about complementary topics related to the course. Basically, the platform was used as a substitute of the hand-outs supplied to the students. However, professor and students familiarized very fast with the use and the advantages of the e-learning platform and, other capabilities of Claroline started to be used such as: forum and chat, alerts, alerts by e-mail and qualifications. The teaching material used in classes, i.e.: powerpoint presentations,… were also uploaded to the documents section of Claroline, thus, students has the teaching material before the class. Nowadays, the teaching materials for the course is being virtualized in a set of HTML pages, so that the students have available the whole course thru the platform Claroline. Video and audio files are also considered to be included as a complement to the teaching materials for the most important topics of the course.

Keywords:

e-learning, virtualization, claronline, moodle.