Abstract:

The project was developed during the academic year 2009/2010 at the Faculty of Preservation of Cultural Heritage of the University of Bologna, in collaboration with the Campus Centre for E-Learning in Bologna (CELA: “Centro E-Learning d’Ateneo”). CELA coordinates all e-learning activities at the University of Bologna, including pedagogy and technology, and supports the authors in preparing the teaching contents and presenting them to students.
CELA has developed the course in Greek Literature and Civilization in blended learning, which means allocating half of the time (30 hours) to traditional lecturing and half to online activities (30 hours), and integrating the course content between the two modes.
Moodle’s flexibility allowed us to insert multiple activities in the course. Not to outsource web designing LOs were created using the software currently in use at the Faculty: Adobe Presenter (slideshow) and EXE-learning (both open source). Users’ reports showed preference for LOs updated in EXE-learning, probably because it allows more interaction between the student and the LO multimedia text. Unlike the Adobe Presenter slideshow, EXE shows the ‘buttons’ that lead to further texts, links, or galleries, and those that play audio files not in sync, but at the user’s prompt. Every LO is available also in PDF for printing and every audio file can be downloaded as MP3.
During the first year of activity, the main institutional actors have been the instructor, the subject tutor, and the technical tutor (who will eventually be superseded by the former two, when they have mastered the system).
Among the activities available on Moodle, the forums were enabled. The first forums to be enabled regarded pedagogy and o technical troubleshooting. Later came the forum posting the students’ lecture notes and the one on how to prepare for the final oral exam. The latter aroused the students’ most specific questions, almost all of which were answered online, with very little need for private e-mail contact. Later we enabled the calendar of activities, the links to external resources, the polls (on the preferred date of a certain event, be it a field trip, a hosted lecture, or a schedule change), and the wiki on authors and literary genres. In preparation for the traditional oral exam, the student memorizes the classical authors’ profiles by compiling files with meaningful data. By doing so, the student has made his or her files available online to all other students. This act reinforces the basic assumption that, in an online community, participation and collaboration are fundamental.
The texts read in class, either by Greek or by contemporary authors, are available online either in writing or in audio files. Multimedia systems make rare texts easily retrieved and constantly available. They may not guarantee actual learning, but they certainly arouse the student’s interest and sensitivity towards the subject in question. According to the reports, the students download the audio files of the texts read by professional actors to their MP3 readers. A group of students walking and listening Homer on the headset is already a victory.

Keywords:

multimedia, classics studies, interactive learning, constructivist approach.