Abstract:

Riga Technical University (RTU) is largest technical background university in Latvia. At the moment there are more than 15 000 students. Each of them is a member of unified university’s Moodle system and each term they participate in more than 2500 different subjects. It’s been 5 years since RTU started to implement e-learning in everyday study process. Considerable progress is achieved and most of academic staff has successfully transformed their work in everyday classroom learning as well as in e-learning. One of most important prerequisites for students to start using e-learning course is their satisfaction with quality and diversity of course materials and activities. Unfortunately academic staff often takes e-learning courses as place, where they upload various study related materials and forget about them. Students see it as a pile of files sometimes even without proper names. This leads to student inactivity and reduction of course visits. We saw rising of course quality as next logic step in e-learning promotion and began to look for activities to achieve this goal. Several efforts were made. One of them was experiment – we found typical e-learning course as mentioned above – with lots of materials, but without order and structure. Of course we can’t push lecturer towards virtual communication or web 2.0 tools, but we were able to use our knowledge and experience in e-learning course building, to upgrade course design and to create more intuitive layout. To measure results we used one of basic theories – Kano model, which was developed in the 80ties. Research was composed from three steps. First, we offered poll to students from particular subject to elucidate their opinion about e-learning curse. Then we rebuilt it and asked those students for another poll with extended evaluationg options. We also measured student activity in rebuilt course compared with previous years. Deeper analysis is laid out in this article.

Keywords:

Instructional design, e-learning.