USING A BLENDED LEARNING APPROACH TO BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN THE WORLD OF INDIVIDUALIZED EDUCATION AND THAT OF COLLABORATIVE WORK

The professional world is not a world of isolated professionals but it is constituted by people who communicate and collaborate in solving problems. In fact, collaborative work is one of the skills requested by employers and, therefore, one that the use of ICT in the classroom must develop.

This paper describes how using Moodle tools such as "forum" and "wiki", together with learning objects, favors achieving collaborative learning. The methodology was applied in an Engineering course that is taught based on a problem solving and analysis strategy. A group of about 30 students was subdivided into four teams. For each of the four teams, a forum and a wiki were created within Moodle.

Forums were used to document the information exchange that occurred while solving/analyzing a problem. This is the same information that normally flows clandestinely while solving traditional individual exams. Forums also document the steps they took to solve a given problem, including sub-tasks distribution

Through the wiki, students built a web page with the problem analysis. That allowed them to navigate from one topic to another in a nonlinear way, introduce graphic files while exposing their analysis.

The course evaluation was performed by weighting the development of these activities with some other elements such as class participation. The advantage with this approach is that the final score does not depend on what is memorized for an exam, but on the work developed throughout the course, along with classmates.

This paper shows the results obtained during a full term and an initial assessment of the student’s opinion about this methodology.