(385)EDUCATION ON LINE IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION

摘要

The new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) bring about greatopportunities in the learning-teaching process and in this work an experience oriented toeducate university students in moral values is presented. More concretely, we arereferring to the “Technologies for Development Cooperation” subject. It is offered on-linethrough Moodle platform and it is focused to students of all the colleges of the Universityof Castilla-la Mancha. The subject is taught by eight professors and two assistants ofseven different Departments and five technical colleges. This particularity and the factthat it is accessible on line make this a novel experience in our University.During the first years, the subject was only available for students of the AlmadenPolytechnical College. The number of participants in the subject was relatively low andthis fact can be explained because the great number of optional subjects the studentscan choose and the human development cooperation is more attractive in the context ofhuman and social studies rather than in scientific and technical careers. So, a decisionwas taken to offer this subject in all colleges of the University to get more students and inconsequence the number of teachers was increased.In this paper, we introduce the contents of the subject and we try to show the behaviourpatterns of the students with respect to a course that is different than technological orscientific subjects, the interaction between students and teachers and between studentsand Moodle: the Virtual Learning Environment. Besides, another interesting point is thatMoodle is a Free web application under the GNU General Public License and this isconsidered coherent with some questions on the basic contents of the subject related tothe promotion and use of Free Software in less developed countries introduced as adevelopment parameter.We give considerable importance to activities like text-based discussion forums. The useof Education Forums as a learning tool has great advantages: the diversity ofmethodological techniques is increased, student participation is more active and a moreflexible and effective learning process can be offered. Nevertheless, they have also somedisadvantages: information overload, needs of moderation, lost of control and thedifficulty fact of motivation. In the second part of this work we focus our attention on thedifficulties detected in the control of the forum along the academic year 2007-2008 andthe applied solutions during the academic year 2008-2009.As conclusions, we will present the major difficulties found during last years and thestrategies to improve for the next academic year.