Abstract:

The new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) bring about great opportunities in the learning-teaching process and in this work an experience oriented to educate university students in moral values is presented. More concretely, we are referring to the “Technologies for Development Cooperation” subject. It is offered on-line through Moodle platform and it is focused to students of all the colleges of the University of Castilla-la Mancha. The subject is taught by eight professors and two assistants of seven different Departments and five technical colleges. This particularity and the fact that it is accessible on line makes this a novel experience in our University.

During the first years, the subject was only available for students of the Almaden Polytechnical College. The number of participants in the subject was relatively low and this fact can be explained because the great number of optional subjects the students can choose and the human development cooperation is more attractive in the context of human and social studies rather than in scientific and technical careers. So, a decision was taken to offer this subject in all colleges of the University to get more students and in consequence the number of teachers was increased.

In this paper, we introduce the contents of the subject and we try to show the behaviour patterns of the students with respect to a course that is different than technological or scientific subjects, the interaction between students and teachers and between students and Moodle: the Virtual Learning Environment. Besides, another interesting point is that Moodle is a Free web application under the GNU General Public License and this is considered coherent with some questions on the basic contents of the subject related to the promotion and use of Free Software in less developed countries introduced as a development parameter.

We give considerable importance to activities like text-based discussion forums. The use of Education Forums as a learning tool has great advantages: the diversity of methodological techniques is increased, student participation is more active and a more flexible and effective learning process can be offered. Nevertheless, they have also some disadvantages: information overload, needs of moderation, lost of control and the difficulty fact of motivation. In the second part of this work we focus our attention on the difficulties detected in the dinamization and control of the forum along the academic year 2007-2008 and the applied solutions during the academic year 2008-2009.

As conclusions, we will present the major difficulties found during last years and the strategies to improve for the next academic year.

Keywords:

Human Development Cooperation, Appropriate Technologies, Education Online.