Abstract:

The Bologna process involves a number of initiatives to improve the higher educational system in the EU area. Among these actions, a new role of the teaching/learning process is considered. Teachers’ work, their choice of teaching methods, and student activities are influenced by the need of looking for the most efficient ways to achieve required competences related to a specified study program. Active learning, e.g. learning activities and the face-to-face interaction between student and teacher, takes the place of the didactic lecture which has been widely used with large groups. This new strategy is not “cost-neutral”. It should imply administrative, infrastructural and staff recruiting investments. However, present economic context is not the most favorable climate to obtain financial support. At times, teachers must face new more time-consuming teaching requirements with existent resources, that is, the same infrastructures and the same large student groups. Also, teachers have to meet the same research demands for promotion and tenure. To mix this cocktail, we have resorted to our imagination and to the student’s responsibility and willingness.
Our course is suitable for setting out many numerical exercises, so we continually propose exercises in class and for homework. According to the exercise relevance, it is completely solved in class or just the end numbers of the solution are showed in the blackboard. Students interchange their solved exercises at random. Each student assigns a mark to the exercise of a classmate and makes a note of the mark and the name of the author. At the end of the class, students collect their own exercises.
A few years ago, our university adopted Moodle as a learning management system. Moodle is a software package for producing Internet-based courses and is provided freely as open source software. Each student has access to the courses for which he/she is enrolled.
We build a Choice Module for receiving the assessment of the exercise. This tool works like a poll and was originally thought either be used to vote on something, or to get feedback from every student. We prepare as number of options as possible marks, and we select that students can view the results of the choice activity. We fix a deadline of two days to submit the marks. Students enter their user name and password, choose the course, and vote on the option with their assigned mark. Their responsibility also includes checking the introduced mark of the classmate whose exercise they evaluated. When the defined close date arrives, a spreadsheet with student names and marks can be downloaded.
Four main conclusions can be highlighted from our results. First, the system has been really well assimilated and accepted by the students. Second, an excess of zeal is sometimes observed in the way the exercises are assessed by some students. Affected students show their disagreement with the assigned mark and we generally allow they modify it. Third, in these cases of upgraded marks, students which initially marked the exercise rarely report that the entered mark diverges of the mark they assigned. Fourth, in general, students are responsible and the entered marks are trusty.

Keywords:

ECTS, large groups, Moodle, evaluation.