Abstract:

Today’s society is widely claiming new educational methodologies that can replace the traditional educational methods in the future. The rapid advance of information technologies (targeted at satisfying society requirements) should be accompanied by a similar development of education, while preserving the advantages of traditional methodologies.

A virtual classroom (VC) can be defined as an online classroom, which allows participants to communicate with one another, view presentations or videos, interact with other participants, and engage with resources in work groups. Thus, it takes place in an online learning environment. This environment can be web-based and accessed through a portal or software-based and require a downloadable executable file. Teacher and students are logged into the virtual learning environment at the same time.

Receiving course contents through the VC is only part of the process. A mechanism enabling interaction and communication exchange must also exist. The VC provides a tool for communication between student and teacher, or among students themselves, to ensure this interaction. Sometimes, the VC is just a website to show the contents of a subject, without interacting with the students.
The class contents distributed through the VC must be especially designed for that purpose. Several multimedia tools were created in our VC under the name of “discussion forums”, specifically: public tutorials, private tutorials suggestions box, cafeteria, bulletin board, proposed activities, self-assessment activities, among others. In this work, we will discuss different experiences of VC used in theory and laboratory classes at the Universitat Jaume I.