Abstract:

Technical University in Gabrovo, Bulgaria is celebrating 50 years anniversary in July this year. It has three faculties - Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, Faculty of Mechanical and Precision Engineering and Faculty of Economics. Until now we had only in-presence learning form.

Before starting the project for building and using an e-learning platform, we experienced the following challenges:
- The in-presence learning form restricts the count of our students, because most of them lives in different parts of the country and some of them are working in parallel with learning;
- The students must learn in time-fixed semesters and have no possibility to use flexible their free time;
- The students that start their education in the university has different levels of knowledge and it is difficult to be educated together;
- When a student starts its education in one specialty, it have no possibility to take any course from another specialty;
- We rather had curriculums developed from business organizations and aligned with their requirements;
- We educate only students, graduated people can’t improve their knowledge in their whole life.

Last year we started a project for building an e-learning system. The platform is ready now and it already contains 22 modules from Bachelor’s degree programs, 3 master degree programs with 32 modules, six modules for alignment of new student’s knowledge and also three modules developed from business companies. The plans are to implement more than 100 courses and to offer distance learning in at least three Bachelor and three Master programs at the end of this year.

Our platform is based on Moodle 2.3 and it has some interesting extensions. At first we built a virtual library platform, which enables the students to access learning materials of their interest, without need to be enrolled in a course.

At second we built a connection between e-learning system and our existing university management system, which enable data exchange and possible mixing of distance learning and in-presence education.

We also implemented a flexible report system and a statistic system, which enables to create configurable reports, to obtain statistics about every student and every course taken, to measure the time needed for every single module and other interesting features.

The aim of this paper is to share our experience, starting from defining the initial need from e-learning system, to describe some technical details, encountered difficulties and the way we overcome it and the overall effect from implementation of the system.

Keywords:

e-learning, University, Moodle, distance education, Implementation.