Supervisors info:
Αγορίτσα Γόγουλου, ΕΔΙΠ, Πληροφορικής και Τηλεπικοινωνιών, Ε.Κ.Π.Α.
Summary:
This dissertation aims to present environments of Tele-Education, Online Assessment and Proctoring as well as the creation of two Learning Paths which would share similar educational material but presented with different structures, in order to evaluate different pedagogical approaches for a group of students.
A variety of platforms and tools are available worldwide to meet the needs of Synchronous and Asynchronous Tele-Education, Online Assessment and Proctoring. Technological evolution has led to the rapid development of such systems and their capabilities. The platforms of Tele-Education, apart from sharing some common characteristics, offer features that vary from platform to platform. The same is true for platforms of Online Assessment and for proctoring tools. The choice of platform and tools to be used, depends on the needs that one wishes to meet.
In the context of utilizing the e- Class open source Asynchronous Education platform for the postgraduate course «Design & Use of e – Learning Environments», it was decided to use the Learning Path tool. More specifically, two Learning Paths were created that share similar educational material but have different structures, in order to evaluate different pedagogical approaches for a group of students. The content of these Learning Paths is based on the material and learning objectives of the course. In the first Learning Path, each topic section contains all the material that is True-False questions, Multiple Choice questions, Matching questions, Discussion and open-ended activities. The second Learning Path is divided into two sub-Learning Paths, where the first one consists of Discussion and open-ended activities that correspond to each topic and the second one consists of True-False questions, Multiple Choice questions and Matching questions for each topic. The students were separated into two groups, for each learning path. They were asked to comment (a) whether the content proved to be useful in terms of understanding the underlying concepts and propose further improvements on the given material and (b) whether the sequence of the material, activities and questions of the Learning Path, was satisfactory or disorienting and their suggestions on what structure they would prefer.
The design of the questions and the construction of the two Learning Paths, relied upon the text comprehension theory of Kintsch which distinguishes two levels of text comprehension, the Text-base model and the Situation model.
The students’ answers revealed the need to provide additional material and activities/questions for both Learning Paths. Moreover, for the first Learning Path 50% of the students stated that the sequence of the material, activities and questions was satisfactory, while for the second Learning Path the corresponding percentage was 66.6%.
Keywords:
Learning Path, Educational material, Tele-Education, Online assessment, Theory of Kintsch
