Abstract:

Nowadays, all academic institutions over the world use a virtual campus for educational purposes. At the University of Cadiz (Spain), this tool is used by most of the teachers as a repository of academic material. During the period 2011-2016, we use the virtual campus as an integrated evaluation system for students. The virtual campus, in basic computer science and other Physiotherapy subjects, is used to add marks about learning outcomes using the task system tools. These tasks are composed by several activities made at home or in class (exams, training activities, etc.). The task-based system was developed using a 100-point scale, where each task had a given value from the total score. In relation to the tasks design, the most difficult activity was to decide the correct score of each task.

The main aim of this work is to obtain several advantages for the students with this method: quicker evaluation, feedback about the tasks and the possibility of resubmit and improve them, marks migration to academic records, etc. The main problem detected along this time was to correct task explanations; they were modified using the student feedbacks, with the purpose of refine the explanation text to be more understandable. Furthermore, we consider two types of students: Students attending classes and Students not attending classes; So as to adjust the evaluation criterion to both groups of student, but keeping in mind student attending classes have more advantages.

In order to obtain the student satisfaction, a survey to evaluate the student impressions is performed. This survey was filled in the subject finals and consisted on two principal questions: “Do you consider the task-based method adequate for evaluation?” and “Were materials provided in virtual campus (to accomplish/to complete) task useful?”. Both questions obtained more than 72% of affirmative answers. On the other hand, success rate was increased up to 96%-100%, during the period mentioned above.

In conclusion, an increase in the success rate of the subjects is observed; as well as the impressions obtained from the final surveys, giving an acceptable rate and in some cases some advises to upgrade the method.

Keywords:

Evaluation, virtual campus, e-learning, task-based method.