DESCRIPTION OF AN EXPERIENCE IN UNIVERSITY CLASSROOM TEACHING-LEARNING: CAN THE LEARNING OF STATISTICS BE IMPROVED THROUGH VIRTUAL FORUMS?

The virtual teaching-learning environments offer a series of possibilities to promote interaction, collaboration, positive interdependence among participants, dialogue and a new role of teacher as advisor. One of these possibilities is the use of virtual discussion forums, a tool that allows students to read and post messages to debate, interact and receive feedback from other students and the teacher. In short: develop the competence for learning to learn a way of being ubiquitous and collaborative.

This work tries to aim in the improvement of the different levels of aptitude and attitude - towards statistics - through the use of virtual forums in the teaching-learning process in a classroom environment, thus building a more flexible educational framework that is promoted by the technological environment in traditional teaching.

A research-action model is used with natural groups of the Degrees of Banking, Finance and Insurance and Administration and Business Management. The research focuses on the use of the Moodle platform supported in classroom teaching.

Two forums were proposed, in asynchronous mode, of different nature, both from their approach with material support, and in the typology of activity to be performed by the students. Specifically, one of the forums aims to create a scientific opinion based on audiovisual materials, while the objective of the second forum is to apply statistical techniques of inference, learned in the subject, to a set of data, to formulate scientific and professional conclusions.

An analysis of several variables of the learning scenario has been carried out, which both teachers and students. The main source of information has been the activity records in the Moodle platform, which have been combined with other data related to the student typology and the final academic performance obtained in the course. The comparison of the results obtained from this analysis with those obtained for the students enrolled in a group in which no forums (control group) are proposed, allows to measure the impact of this activity on the levels of aptitude and Attitude toward statistics