Abstract:

During last years, the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) has been promoting and encouraging the design, production, and use of different multimedia resources, like instructional videos, screencasts, virtual laboratories, OpenCourseWare and Masive Open Online Courses. All these resources (38201 learning objects by November 2017) are stored in, and can be publicly accessed through, the institutional repository RiuNet (https://riunet.upv.es/). These resources enable students to review at any place and any time the contents of a given class, how to solve a particular problem, learn to use the tools and methodologies used in the laboratories and, in some cases, even perform a self-assessment to determine their degree of acquisition of knowledge, skills, and competences.

If ICT tools are to become effective and integral tools in education, monitoring and evaluation of this process are indispensable. Many works have already focused on designing and producing better and better multimedia resources, but not much attention has been paid to studying the actual use students make of these resources, and the impact they have on students’ learning process and academic results. For this multimedia material to be useful students must know about its existence and how to correctly use it. That was the goal of an internal UPV’s project for education innovation and improvement. This project monitored different information related to available multimedia resources and its use, like the number of times a multimedia resource is used, the date of that access (before or after a class, close to the examination period, or the deadline for a given assignment), the content of the resource, and its length, but also whether students know about the existence of different digital repositories for multimedia resources, whether they use them autonomously or just at teacher’s suggestion, and their satisfaction with those resources. The analysis of this information could help establishing why some resources are much more used than others, profiling the use of these resources according to different degrees (engineering, architecture, and tourism), and relating this use with students’ academic results.

Results obtained for course 2016/2017 at different subjects of several Grades at UPV will be shown, providing information about the real use of ICT materials.

Keywords:

Multimedia resources, digital repository.