Abstract:

The paper aims to present the Bachelor Degree in Business Administration in Complex Learning, at the Department of Management (University of Turin, Italy). Started in 2014/2015, the bachelor aims to allow workers, off-site and professional students to attend university lessons and, then, to graduate; all lessons are delivered only in e-learning modality (or distance education, with a registration and an academic fee) to favour the participation in courses. The degree, a three-year-long undergraduate course, will be available on a specific platform based on Moodle that allows to log into all educative contents and didactical materials. Students can attend lessons through videos and multimedia contents (virtual simulations, power point presentations, slide-talks, audio presentations, pdf contents, surveys, video-conferences, case-histories videos and CEOs’ interviews… ), participate in communities of practice – in virtual rooms – where they can collaborate with others to study or develop projects and share knowledge. Besides, a community manager and some online tutors (e-tutors) are also present to support students in all their activities and educative processes (both to registration and career plan and educative activities). All activities use the distance learning modality; only exams and dissertation difenses are done face to face in University classrooms. Nowadays, the bachelor in complex learning includes 34 courses, 656 users enrolled and 7,000 videos; in June 2018, the platform had 38,755 logins (students, professors and tutors); since January 2018, the platform had 174,436 users’ logins.
Each course is organized into several video-lesson units (normally, each video is 12-20 minutes long) and related exercises (such as tests, multiple choice questions, SCORM, forums…) to verify the learning goals and to prepare exams. These sections are also based on several html5 contents, such as interactive videos and tests to help students to develop an active approach in their studying phases. All video-lessons are based on several forms, partly according to Paivio’s Dual-coding theory and, above all, Richard Mayer’s directions to favour a better multimedia learning experience.
During 2017/2018, we have carried out an online survey for starting an exploratory research to evaluate the effectiveness of the experience and to verify the efficacy of videos and professors’ main communicative skills (from the point of view of students). In this paper, we will explain both the models of our multimedia products and survey’s results of this first evaluation phase. Valter Cantino wrote paragraphs no. 1.1. and 4; Lorenzo Denicolai 1 and 2; Alberto Parola 3, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4.

Keywords:

University e-learning, e-learning bachelor, multimedia tools, audio-visual language, multimedia, distance education, undergraduate education.