Abstract:

There are ten public universities in Andalucía, all of them involved in the “Campus Andaluz Virtual, CAV, (http://www.campusandaluzvirtual.es)”. The “Consejería de Innovación Ciencia y Empresa” of the Junta de Andalucía, is responsible for higher education and University programs. This Consejería promoted the CAV as the main project of the “Digital University”. Each University in Andalucía offers, using the CAV, about 10 subjects, and are coordinated so that every student of the ten universities can take any of the subjects offered in this campus and be validated as “Free configuration” subjects in their curricula. About eight students from each university can select any of the 84 subjects so a maximum number of 80 students can enroll each subject.
In this paper, our educational research group presents the objectives and methodology of a “Soil Contamination” subject that we offer to the CAV from the University of Malaga. On a different paper presented also in this conference, we show also the results obtained.
The objectives are in agreement with those defined for the Convergence to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA): To place the student as the center of the teaching/learning process, and to develop tools that promote the attitude for permanent learning.
Obviously, the methodology, which is supported on a Moodle platform, must be consistent with these objectives, and is summarized in the following lines:
High quality documents are made available on the platform from the beginning of the term related the different topics of the subject. The teaching team elaborates these documents. In principle, the availability of this material allows the students an important flexibility in their decision about when to study each topic. Nevertheless, we are also promoting the collaborative work within groups of about 10 students each, so it is important that all the students have reached a certain stage in their learning that allow them to make a profitable contribution to the group’s work.
This is achieved by different techniques (inspired by the Trivial Pursuit (board game), based mainly, but not only, on the databases and forums of the Moodle platform. Each week, using the database, each student must develop two questions for two of the topics. Therefore, at the end of the term a total number of about 1800 questions are available. This task is open for three weeks.
At the same time, but for one more week, we open a forum for every topic. In this forum the students may ask any doubts that they have found while reading the material, show new findings that they have made regarding the topic, or criticize the questions presented on the database by their colleges. The database elaboration and this forum represent 25 % and 15 % respectively of the total mark. At the end of the term, the platform makes an individualized questionnaire from the database, which accounts for another 25 %.
After the fourth week, each group receives a practical case of a contaminated soil, for which they should make a short dossier presenting a reasonable solution. Each practical case is assigned to at least two groups.Their work is done using a forum for each group. This represents another 20 %. For the remaining 15 %, the students have another forum in which they should make constructive critics to the dossiers of the other groups.

Keywords:

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