E-MAIL MEDIATED TUTORSHIP/COMMUNICATION AND OTHER ONLINE RESOURCES IN UNIVERSITY TEACHING: A CASE OF STUDY

E-mail and other online resources facilitate student-teacher communication and learning. The European Space for Higher Education emphasizes on changing the teaching activity from the traditional transmission of knowledge to a more educative way of teaching, helping the students to use the information to construct their knowledge. In this context, on-line resources could be powerful tools for learning activities. Despite its potential benefits, the effectiveness of e-mail and other online resources, when used to support learning in higher education, is very variable making important to identify those factors which best predict successful implementations. In our case, we have evaluated the effectiveness of e-mail tutorship in comparison with face to face communication to solve student queries. On the other hand, we have tested the use of University online resources to promote student self-learning. The number of students in this particular case is 90. We have prepared an activity in two steps, first an individual research, and secondly a group discussion (8 students in each) and class presentation. We have told students to compare several scientific papers related to a particular item of the lectures. First, each student was asked to select and read a paper and then elaborate a scheme that permitted to compare this paper with the rest of the group. Secondly, all participants from a group prepared a PowerPoint presentation comparing their papers and presented it to the class. On-line University resources were supplied in order to select the papers in a friendly way. This activity was proposed in order to promote self-learning and cooperation. Students seem to prefer E-mail to address their initial doubts. This kind of communication, when active (short question-answer period) presents several advantages, as flexibility and swiftness, and could motivate the students keeping the learning process. In addition, several students usually face with the same kind of questions, and on line technologies permits making a general answer to every student. However, face to face communication is needed for more specific explanations. The study of messages has permitted to establish categories and to detect the most frequent student queries. Regarding the students questions they had difficulties in: 1) using on-line resources, specially the academic ones (databases, University platform, journal links); 2) they don’t feel confident in selecting information by their own, even when we have indicated the sources of information that they can use; 3) they are not used to synthesize the information in schemes or even processing the information, as they tend just to transcribe the text. E-mail tutorship has successfully enhanced the communication with the students; they feel close to the teacher and with confidence to ask questions. As some of the main problems were the use of the academic on-line resources and the selection and extraction of information, we are going to focus on promoting activities in this respect.