Abstract:

On another paper of this conference, we present the objectives and methodology of a “Soil Contamination”, subject of the Campus Andaluz Virtual (CAV). Here we present the results and evaluation of the experience.
The CAV is the main project of the “Digital University” for Andalucía. A maximum of 80 students can enroll each of the 84 subjects offered in the CAV. Soil Contamination was offered for the first time in the second semester of the 2007-2008 academic year, and was enrolled by 66 students, whereas 71 students are enrolled in this semester of 2008-2009. The students of this subject are not only coming from different universities but also have different backgrounds. For instance, in the 2008-2009 year we have students from 12 different titles, among which are 6 students of nursing, 9 of geography, or 22 of environmental sciences.
As we have indicated on the previous paper, the students obtain their marks from the evaluation of five different issues: The first two are the elaboration of questions to build up a database for the final questionnaire: each of these tasks accounts for a 25 % of the students’ marks. The third task, performed by groups of 6 - 9 members, consists in writing a dossier that presents a reasoned solution for a specific soil contamination case, and represents another 20 %. These marks are given not only after the quality of the dossier but also after the public discussions that the students made in the forum open for each group. The fourth and fifth issues, each representing 15 % of the marks, are the student’s contribution to two more forums. The first one consists really in one forum per each of the eleven topics of the subject, in which the students can ask doubts, present additional information to the topic, or criticize the questions that their colleagues have presented for the database. In the remaining forum, the students constructively criticize the dossiers of the other groups, and the members of the group should argue why their dossier was a good work or discuss alternatives that could improve it.
More than 50 % of the students obtained at least 90 % of the marks for the construction of the questionnaire database, whereas 20 % did not contribute at all, and the total number of accepted inputs was over 800 questions.
On the last couple of weeks, each student answered for 30 minutes a questionnaire with 25 questions selected randomly for each student from the database, with at least two from each of the eleven topics. As before, more than 50 % of the students obtained more than 90 % of correct answers.
The results obtained in the first year experience with respect to the work in group were somewhat more disappointing, probably due to the difficulties that the students of different backgrounds find to communicate with each other using a tool that is also visible for the teaching team. To help to overcome this problem, in the second year we have initiated the group work with a more “relaxed” task, to help the students to get used to the communication before starting the “hard” work.
Regarding the results for the last two forums, the number of students that obtained more than 70 % of the marks were above 50 % for critics to the group work but less than 30 % for the forums for the topics.

Keywords:

ehea, permanent learning, moodle, collaborative work, forum.