Abstract:

E-learning provides more opportunities for teachers to provide up-to-date information, to manage teaching, to stimulate activity, to motivate to discover and to communicate more with students. The Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra uses e-learning more or less “unrestrainedly”, mostly in the framework of various projects, or using the results of projects in the teaching process. As an example, of the 134 registered electronic courses and electronic objects in the electronic support database of Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra, 129 were created within the projects, most of them KEGA and Leonardo da Vinci.

Therefore, a group of employees of the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra, together with co-researchers of the University of Economics in Bratislava and the University of Žilina, who are convinced that e-learning plays an important role in the education process, decided to submit the KEGA project entitled "Creating an University E-learning Portal of SUA in Nitra.

The project's goal was to innovate the proposed concept of wider e-learning implementation in the teaching process of recent years and to propose a modern education system at the Slovak University of Agriculture and University of Zilina, with an emphasis on ensuring its quality. Precondition for the success of this strategic goal was to build the university e-learning portal based on LMS Moodle (Moodle's Highest Stable Version), editing the graphical environment and ensuring the greatest possible compatibility during the transfer of courses from old versions of faculties´ installations of Moodle to the new portal.

The e-learning survey was conducted based on polling that have been published on the faculty web site, in LMS Moodle, by the employees requesting the head and secretaries to distribute questionnaires both in printed and on-line form, by asking students to distribute questionnaires in the form of URL notification. Anonymous questionnaires created in Google Forms were used for the survey. The e-learning surveys showed that students and employees have positive attitude towards e-learning, but there are relatively few electronic courses, some of which are presented as courses, but in fact they are still just file repositories. This is despite the fact that the file repositories are quite available to the teacher, one of them being a repository site directly in LMS Moodle.

At the Congress Center of the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra, a seminar on E-learning took place, which included the competition for the best electronic course. Nine courses were registered in two categories (7 courses were attended), which were first assessed anonymously by three independent reviewers. At the seminar, the contestants presented their courses to a 9-member evaluation committee. The competition and the seminar confirmed the importance of creating a full-university e-learning portal.

Keywords:

Moodle, e-learning portal, surveys, seminar.