Abstract:

The project “ICT, Milano, città cablata”, carried on since 2007 by CILEA, the Interuniversitary Consortium to which we belong, and financed by the town council of Milan had been devoted to exploit the city’s optical fibre system, developing some high profile projects to promote innovation, new technologies usage and human capital valorisation.
Pilot FAD is its output in the elearning field, made by the elearning staff at CILEA.

Within the project Pilot FAD, CILEA has realized a demonstrative, but fully functional, elearning system using the most recent technologies and the most advanced didactic models in the field. Based on high level didactic contents and dedicated to, but not only, a typical academic public, this project wanted to demonstrate the real teaching effectiveness and some new didactic approaches of these long distance elearning solutions, allowing real and productive interaction to the triad of participants represented by teachers, tutors and learners.

The project has used and implemented a technological platform dedicated to elearning only, based on Open Source state-of-the-art LMS software and consistent with the most recent didactic needs, with particular attention to the newest multimedia channels, like third generation phones, PDAs, etc. and their specific solutions to be implemented.

The elearning courses have been built by CILEA as well, with the efforts and cooperation of a panel of academic experts, and have been designed for many and different levels and kinds of knowledge to be acquired, as well as to target some and different publics.

The didactic model chosen had been the constructivist one, seen as the best to be implemented for its innovation in didactic methodology and its deep links with Moodle, the LMS chosen by the project Pilot FAD, (http://moodle.org).

In September 2009 the project ended, with a final qualitative evaluation of the maths part made by the “Centro Politecnico Superior, Universidad de Saragoza”, achieved with the help of a panel of their real university students.

The activities of designing, evaluating, preparing and implementing the courses ended with eight different elearning paths, developed on three diverse thematic issues, all realized and hosted by CILEA at its headquartes, in Segrate (MI):
- "Milano: percorsi storico-archeologici” (Milan: Historical and Archaeological Routes), historical-tourist path, dedicated to an overall knowledge of the historical Milan and its territories;
- "Matematica e dintorni" (Mathematics and Surroundings), a multilanguages version (Italian, Spanish, English) of some basic mathematic online courses for university beginners
- "Il mondo della finanza oggi" (“The Finance World Today”), online course on mortgage in two versions: base level, academic level.

On October 30th 2009 these courses have been made publicly available by CILEA, releasing some accesses credentials in exchange for having completed an online questionnaire, which we implemented to understand better the real market interests, both qualitative and quantitative, for this kind of didactic solutions.
A self registration, ten minute of time spent to answer a questionnaire, to get a full month of free access to the elearning course you like more. Not bad, isn’t it?

Keywords:

Elearning, multilanguage, moodle, constructivism, CILEA, Milan, Finance.