DEVELOPING COMPUTATIONAL TOOLS FOR THE PORTABILITY OF INFORMATION IN DIFFERENT VIRTUAL SYSTEMS

This work shows the developing and implementation of a computational tool for working with information from different virtual systems, maintaining the format. This software is a set of several ‘mini-tools’ which all together compound an aid system for virtual teaching and learning. One of this minitools allows to retrieval data in xml format and to migrate them to different virtual platforms (WebCT, Moodle, Sakai and Ilias). As it is well known, the direct portability is not easy for non expert users, specifically when moving information from WebCT to other free virtual implementations. This is a problem for most of the users at the universities in Spain, who have developed their teaching resources for this system along the last years. The utility has a graphic interface that allows the user to choose –in a friendly and easy way- the initial system (origin) and the final virtual one (destine), the data that are going to be exported and the format of the final file. The other mini-tools are related with repository of images, management of data bases (test, bibliography, etc.).
The utility of the tool is mainly focused on data bases of questionnaires of different subjects. In this way, the teaching teams can use these questions for different purposes (auto-evaluation of the students, as examples, exercises, motivation for learning, support for teaching, etc.) In fact, some text books edited by prestigious editorials have implemented this facility. In particular, the application of exporting questions has been used to check the system with satisfactory results in two different faculties of the University Complutense of Madrid.