Is the Lessons tool useful to support students learning?

Abstract

[EN] Nowadays, Information and Communication Technologies play an important role in the teaching-learning process. Universities have incorporated different platforms specifically designed to educational institutions; among others Moodle and Sakai are being used in Spanish Universities. In particular, the Universitat Politècnica de València has adopted the PoliformaT platform, adapted from Sakai. It consists on different tools that facilitate the teaching and learning processes and the teacher–student communication. It enables teachers to improve their instructional design and it is of key importance in blended learning and flipped classroom approach. Lessons is a specific tool available in PoliformaT, which enables the organization of the different educational resources. It combines lecture slides, video lectures (from the teacher or from others sources), exams (quizzes, self-/peer-assessment), tasks and so on. The extensive use of the online platform in the daily learning of the subject, by several teachers and different student groups, needs to pay special attention to the resources organization. In contrary case, the subject platform can become a mess, losing its usefulness. In this paper, the utilization of Lessons by students in two first course subjects at the Universitat Politècnica de València is studied. The teachers of physics of the Aerospace Engineering Degree and electricity of Electronic and Automatic Engineering Degree have designed the course activities by means of the Lessons tool. There are important research questions related to the Lessons tool: how often, when, and how students access to the different contents?, do they think it is useful? At a second level, one can be asked if student perceptions are related to learning outcomes. We will use students' learning tracks, student’s survey and scores to answer these questions.