Abstract:

In the last two decades there is a growing interest among universities for the use of Internet in teaching and learning. In addition, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have changed the nature of open and distance education by providing learning communities for teachers and students, where they can interact with each other even if they are situated in different geographical locations. Recent research in Classics, though, shows that these undergraduate studies still don’t use ICT extensively for interaction and communication between the students and the instructors or between the students and the learning materials. Apart from this lack of experience in the use of ICT, these students do not receive any training or courses on pedagogy and didactics. In this context, the graduates in Classics in Spain are obliged to do a master’s degree in education in order to be qualified to teach in public secondary education schools. As a result of the above situation, the students of the master’s program in teacher training in obligatory and upper secondary education at the University of Barcelona, specialty in Latin, Greek and Classical Culture –some of them working in parallel with their studies- face important difficulties for the preparation of their Master’s Theses, since together with the philological contents, they have to deal, for the first time, with methodology, didactics and innovation aspects. This paper aims to propose some changes in the focus of the teaching and learning process with a new students’ virtual tutoring system, applied during the academic year 2010-2011 at the University of Barcelona, as a complement to the face-to-face activities, for the elaboration of the Master’s Theses. More analytically, a Learning Content Management System (LCMS) was used to carry out virtual meetings between the students and their tutors. At the same time, some free applications (wikis, blogs, online surveys, self-evaluation exercises) were used for the assessment and practice of the theory taught in the face-to-face classes. The very positive final results of the students participating and their satisfaction expressed through an online opinion survey, confirm our initial hypothesis, that ICT can facilitate the teaching and learning process even in more “traditional” studies and can be welcomed by the students’ community, despite the few usability problems that may appear at the beginning of the application of this virtual tutoring system.

Keywords:

Master in teacher training in obligatory and upper secondary education, Master's Theses, on-line tutoting, e-monitoring, Classics, e-learning.