Abstract:

In the last years, the Information and Communication Technologies have made possible the appearance of interactive spaces between teacher and students. A vast number of e-learning systems are developed to achieve this interaction. Among all of the Virtual Learning Environments, (VLEs), the most outstanding is the management platform of educational content Moodle.

VLEs allow students to find information, and learning resources relevant to the development of the subject. They also can submit homework and classwork assignments, perform self-assessment quizzes, check their grades, participate in debates, etc.

In this context, teaching materials that are uploaded to the platform become a key factor in this type of training, to the extent they contain the material that must be assimilated by the students and the learning objectives pursued and, consequently, the evaluation will fall on them. On the other hand, the support for the teaching materials is varied as they may be more or less dynamic, interactive or hypermedia and upgradeable.

Moodle contains a wide range of activity modules that can be used to build up any type of course. In particular, in this paper we will focus on the use of Lesson module in Moodle in teaching Organic Chemistry. We have prepared two Lessons of Moodle for the subject “Organic Chemistry I” in the second year of the Degree in Chemistry about “Functional group interconversion by nucleophilic substitution” and “Nucleophilic substitution reactions involving formation of new C-C bonds”.

Moodle enables teachers to create a lesson in form of a series of HTML pages that provide them the possibility of directing a special itinerary of the learning. These pages can be presented in a linear fashion or in a branching manner, or a combination of the two. So, it is necessary to take a few minutes to draw a flowchart for the Lesson.

A Lesson is a way of presenting sequentially a training content. This content is showed in form of a series of pages, each one ending with a question. If the students answer it successfully, they may continue. Otherwise, they can be sent back to review the lesson. This allows students to spend as much time as they want or need on tricky questions [1]. Therefore, a Lesson is an adaptive activity. Lessons require more preparation by the teacher that other tools and to plan the order in which the contents are included, but they provide many benefits.

Another advantage of the Lessons is the student does not have to go through the entire lesson in one sitting. If a student goes through some pages and then breaks off, the next time he views the lesson he is asked whether he wants to start at the beginning of the lesson or at the point where they left off.

In conclusion, Lesson of Moodle is in an interesting, flexible and interactive way to show student different topics of a subject, where they read some content, and after that, they have to answer some questions. Based on the answers the student gives, the system sends the student to another page in the Lesson. These questionnaires on lessons make sure that Lessons are read before jumping to the next section. Nevertheless, Lessons do require some set-up and more preparation by the teacher that other tools.

References:
[1] Pandey, S. R., Pandey, S. (2009). Developing a More Effective and Flexible Learning Management System (LMS) for the Academic Institutions using Moodle. ICAL 2009 – Technology, Policy and Innovation, pp. 249-254.

Keywords:

Virtual Learning Environments, Moodle, Lesson of Moodle.