A Romanian Student Profile for a European On-line Course – The “Designing TEL Course” Experience

摘要

It is obvious that in the last decade e-learning technologies marked a significant growth in education and training. At the same time, Information Technology has been implemented in actual education on a large scale, and became a real support for web- based learning. However, despite the great impact that e-learning have produced in the educational area, the developers of e-platforms need to know more about what the students really need, how they perform and reacts to on-line requirements, in order to design and adapt the best solutions that increase the students’ motivation and enhance learning. The paper tries to define a general profile of a Romanian student, involved as a learner in the on-line course “ Designing Technology-Enhanced Learning ”, organized in the frame of the European LLP-KA3 project: “ CoCreat - Enabling Creative Collaboration through Supportive Technologies ” (code 511733-LLP-1-2010-1-FI-KA3-KA3MP). The course gathered students from 4 different countries (Finland, Romania, Estonia and Norway) and had as objective to make students familiar with the concepts , theory and approaches of designing , in strong relation with the use of a distributed set of integrated Technology-Enhanced Learning systems and tools . Trying to draw a specific student's profile, an initial evaluation was made, and provided interesting results related to what is the Romanian student's profile and what are the main students’ expectations, before being engaged in an on-line course - in their case, the first one in which the collaboration with international students in related groups was compulsory.