Abstract:

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are becoming an essential tool to improve quality in the educational institutions, mainly as a way to enhance traditional classroom instruction and to promote students tutoring anywhere at anytime. The secondary and vocational school IES Ingeniero de la Cierva (Murcia, Spain), has a wide experience in applying a VLE as a supporting classroom tool, thus during the course 2007/08 Moodle was implemented. Nowadays, 36 secondary subjects are using this platform as a supporting teaching tool, with more than 400 students enrolled. The aim of the present research was to evaluate the amount and type of resources used by teachers in the VLE during the academic course 2011/2012. Content delivery tools were used as the main way to support instruction (1360 resources were evaluated), with an average of 37.67±31.03 resources used per subject. Content was provided as web links (37.57%), Microsoft Word file format (23.08%), pfd (21.25%) and Moodle web pages (10.00%). On the other hand, only few multimedia resources (flash animation, video and jpg) are being used (2.57%), the use of this kind of resources should be encouraged in order to hook students.

Keywords:

Education, Virtual Learning Environment, Information and Communications Technology, Secondary School.