CLASSROOM INSTRUCTION IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING SUPPORTED BY A VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT. DATA FROM AN EVALUATION OF CONTENT DELIVERY TOOLS

The centre IES Ingeniero de la Cierva (Murcia, Spain) provides vocational education in 8 upper-level and 4 middle-level training cycles corresponding with four vocational families (Administration, Computer Science, Electronics and Health), with more than 600 students enrolled. This educational centre has been using Moodle as Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for supporting classroom instruction during five years. The objective of the present research was to evaluate the resources used by teachers (amount and types) in their virtual courses during the academic course 2011/2012. A total of 37 subjects (14 middle-level and 23 upper-level) are using the VLE daily for supporting classroom instruction, with an average of 74.05±43.94 content delivery resources per subject. Another resources evaluated were the tasks suggested by teachers, that must be performed by students (1160 tasks) and the questionnaires for self-studing (197), showing a medium value of 31.35±30.10 and 5.32±10.15 per subject, respectively. The content delivery tools analyzed (2740 resources) reported that the main types of electronic media used were pdf (27.62±25.75), web links (15.40±30.76), web pages supported by Moodle (9.75±19.60) and Microsoft Word file format (9.40±14.13). On the other hand, a Student's t test was carried out in order to compare the amount of resources used middle-level and upper-level training cycles, founding no statistical differences (P>0.05). In conclusion, vocational training cycles that used the VLE, showed a high amount of content resources delivered.