Abstract:

The University in Spain is involved in a process of adaptation to the European Space for Higher Education (ESHE). The new teaching methodologies increase the importance of student self learning. In this communication is described the methodology that is applied in the practical sessions of the first course in statistics in the Civil Engineer Degree of the Technical University of Valencia. The use of “Poliformat”, a intranet service which is based in Sakai´s project to create a feature-rich learning environment, made possible the introduction of substantial changes in the practical sessions leading to a better use of this resource in our teaching methodologies. The implementation of these changes included the production of new interactive resources which allow the continuous on-line assessment of the students and the production of guided tutorials which served to decrease the rate of wasted time during the practical sessions and consequently supposed an improvement in their quality. This approach also succeed when applied to large groups of students which is very frequent in subjects of first courses and where traditional approaches leads to a poor quality results. Based in the accumulated experience of several years we have recently implemented a new teaching and learning methodology in two experimental reduced groups of students of Statistics I whose self learning results are continuously assessed through some test which are performed before the attendance to the corresponding on-site class (pre-test) and several test that are performed after the on-site classes have taken place (post –test). The pre-tests serve to improve their skills in guiding their own self learning processes. The post-test are addressed to measure the degree of success of the learning process after the classes are delivered.