Session S1D

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27 - 30, 2010, Washington, DC 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference S1D-1

An Effective Way to Plan a Course for EHEA Subjects: Translating Didactical Guides for a

Planning Model

Rafael Pastor, Roberto Hernández, Salvador Ros, Timothy Read, Manuel Castro, and Rocael Hernández Spanish University for Distance Education: rpastor@scc.uned.es, roberto@scc.uned.es, sros@scc.uned.es,

tread@lsi.uned.es, mcastro@ieec.uned.es Galileo University: roc@galileo.edu

Abstract - UNED (Spanish University for Distance Education) is the largest public distance education university in Spain with over 220,000 students, 1600 lecturers and 2000 administrative staff. Actually, the new degrees have been started using the EHEA (European Higher Education Area) directives. So, as it indicates in EHEA specifications, an online course must focus on personal mandatory activities as part of the evaluation model. In order to achieve the EHEA requirements, a didactic guide based on activity items (assessments, tasks, forums discussion, etc.) has been produced by lecturers in order to describe the overall work that students have to do in the course. To support that, an organization and planning system by blocks has been created where information (resources and activities) can be added by teachers from many sources and arranged flexibly. In the paper, a real scenario with two subjects of an official master's degree will be presented. These subjects meet the EHEA requirements. In this case, the way the didactic guide can be “translated” for the planning tool in a simple manner will be presented. Also satisfaction results that have been obtained from student surveys will be presented, in order to validate the use of this new tool and its impact on student learning. Index Terms – Course planning, education practices, adaptation, postgraduate courses.

INTRODUCTION

The Spanish University for Distance Education, UNED [1], is the largest public distance education university in Spain with over 220,000 students, 1600 lecturers and 2000 administrative staff. It has been in existence for more than 35 years. Since it is a distance education university students do not come to a central campus to be taught. They attend regional study centres. There are currently over 60 of these study centres distributed throughout Spain and Europe. As well as the lecturers, the university also has 6900 tutors working in these study centres. The tutors are an important figure in the teaching process because quite often they are the main contact the student has with the university. They

provide the students with support in many ways, for example, giving taught classes, leading laboratory sessions, and helping to resolve any problems the students may have with the subject being studied. One of the key features that set UNED apart from other distance universities is its consistent commitment to innovation, both methodological and technological. As such, it is evident that ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) has always had an important role within the UNED [2],[3]. Over the years its use has grown and currently forms an important part of the university's activities. As well as the online teaching activities it is also used as part of the administration process (where the UNED is moving towards the position of being a paperless university), admissions (where more than 90% of student admissions are being undertaken via Internet), and examinations (where the exams are no longer transported to the local study centres on paper but as encrypted electronic files). However, without a doubt the most important application of ICT in the university has been the development of our own online community-based learning platform, aLF [4], for use in our virtual campus. The aLF platform (active Learning Framework) is a system being developed by researchers in the School of Computer Science). Now aLF is being used in the new degrees and masters following the EHEA (European Higher Education Area) requirements, so special modifications were required for aLF in order to adapt the platform structure to a new evaluation model.

EHEA REQUIREMENTS

The EHEA directives declare the evaluation of personal and group activity as the main feature of an EHEA e-learning space. So, a lecturer must generate a planning model of a course based on individual tasks and collaborative activities between students. The first feature consists of providing an planning tool within aLF to declare the course structure, so that from here, a student has a clear view of his/her objectives and with whom the collaborative work will be undertaken. The planning tool has a user-friendly interface

Session S1D

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that allows different resources from the e-learning platform to be presented in a thematic way or as weekly blocks. The tool allows students to follow the overall course evolution (in terms of time). So, with this guide, the students can plan the use of their own available time to achieve the course objectives presented in the tool. It must be kept in mind that the typical profile of a student at the UNED, is that of a person who works and has limited time for learning activities. However, this is not an impediment to prevent continuous evaluation of the student, with a schedule of activities dictated by the course structure. Continuous evaluation is possible because the programming of the course includes appropriate milestones (individual activities) as part of the continuous assessment (with deadlines for completion and grading). In addition to individual assessment, it is possible to add to the course planning collaborative activities based on specific working subgroups or through a structured Wiki.

PLANNING TOOL

In order to achieve the EHEA requirements, a didactic guide based on activity items (assessments, tasks, forums discussion, etc.) must be produced by teachers in order to describe the overall work that students have to do in the course. To support that, an organizational and block planning system has been created where information (resources and activities) can be added by lecturers from many sources and ordered in any way. The blocks (organizational units) can be expressed in terms of a given topic or in a weekly format, and a summary is available for each block to describe the contents on that topic or week. For each block, new and already existing resources and activities can be included, so reusable activities can be defined in order to help teachers. The planning interface [5], as shown in Figure 1, becomes the Community/Course home and is organized in blocks. There are currently two formats for the blocks: • Weekly Format

o Each block represents a week, the week starts on the same day that the community starts (a value defined as part of the Course Settings of the Block View).

o The current week is highlighted. • Topic Format

o Each block represents a topic, all the activities and resources in a block are related to the topic. In this format the start date of the community is not relevant.

o In this format, the teacher selects the current topic and highlights it automatically until the teachers mark it as not selected or another topic is selected. Only one topic can be selected at a time.

The items available (see Figure 1) for the planning tool can be categorized as: • Static resources. Provides useful links to static content

included in the platform tool. These are based on HTML editors that allow new design capabilities to be added to the planning tool.

• Activities. In order to simplify a lecturer’s work only five categories of tasks have been added to the planning tool (the platform supports other types of activities).

FIGURE 1

RESOURCES AND ACTIVITIES FOR PLANNING TOOL.

The static resources enable the integration of several types of content: • Brief guidance: HTML help or support text for the

student. The item is embedded in the block. The text is reduced to 800 characters.

• HTML page: html text with useful information presented in a new navigator page. The text has no size limits, so it is very easy to produce rich HTML pages.

• Text page: simple text with the same characteristics as HTML pages.

• Multimedia guidance E.D., Document, Multimedia document, link and simulation. In reality, they are documents from the repository area of a course (see Figure 2), which can be categorized to add iconic information as a document or a link. The main advantage for a student is that he/she has a clear idea about the kind of document that is being viewed.

• Table of contents. This is a more structured content view that provides an integrated interface inside a

Session S1D

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course [6]. It allows content chapters, sections or even links to be connected automatically to activities defined in the planning tool. In essence, it defines a content-based view (different from planning view). Figure 3 presents an example table of contents.

• Forum. Link to a particular forum that can be created from the planning tool or from the corresponding tool in the platform.

• Chat room. As per the forums, this represents a link to a chat room defined inside the course.

• Survey. Provides functionality to get information (not gradable) about the learning process: student’s initial knowledge of a subject, course evaluation or student progress, etc.

FIGURE 2 REPOSITORY AREA FOR A COURSE.

FIGURE 3 EXAMPLE OF A TABLE OF CONTENTS.

The activities are very basic, and enable certain kinds of activities to be evaluated: • Self-graded test assessment. This type of activity is

provided in order to let students train general or particular concepts from a subject. There is no external evaluation of these tests.

• Self-graded task. This type of activity is useful to provide an assignment submission area to let students undertake tasks that are not part of the final evaluation.

• Gradable test assessment. These are essentially multiple-choice questionnaires that are automatically corrected. The questions also include matches, mixes and general closed questions. This type of test provides a high degree of flexibility.

• Gradable online exam. Same as the previous test, but including the time and date (start and finish) for the questionnaire.

• Gradable task. It is an assignment submission area to obtain tasks from students (using a file upload mechanism) and enable them to be graded.

Finally, the planning tool provides the main icons for the navigation bar in order to provide the students direct access to the most popular platform tools. The navigation bar (see Figure 4) is configured by lecturers to provide access to the main tools: forums, file storage, evaluations, assignment submission, teaching guide (in pdf), etc.

FIGURE 4 NAVIGATION ICONS.

PRACTICAL CASES

In this case, two subjects have been taken from the post-graduate course (master) “Communication, Networks and Content Management”, which it is taught by Communication and Control Systems Department from UNED. While this master has several modules or subjects, two are presented here: • Distributed computing • Security Networks

For every subject, the lectures must write a teaching guide with in order to provide all the information that a student needs at the initial stage of the course. This guide allows students to program her/his time and participation in the courses. Each teaching guide has the following sections: a) General information. Title, EHEA credits, lecturers,

learning objectives, brief subject description and evaluation.

b) Learning objectives, described in terms of competences (categories: Knowledge, Skill and Aptitude). In table 1, some objectives (16 in total) for the “Distributed computing” case can be seen.

c) Subject contents. Detailed description of subject chapters, and its items.

d) Study materials, and supported resources. e) Planning table for students. This table details the

learning objectives (O1 to O16; for every thematic block), study materials, activities and hours estimated to finish the block. Also, a week based programming is provided (all courses are 16-week long). In Table II the first four thematic blocks for “Security Networks” subject are presented. This section makes up the base of

Session S1D

978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27 - 30, 2010, Washington, DC 40th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference S1D-4

the translation for the planning tool in aLF. In the next section of this paper, the translation will be explained.

f) Tutoring and learner evaluation. This section describes how the lecturer is going to evaluate and tutor student work (based on her/his participation in the e-learning course and her/his activity work).

TABLE I

LEARNING OBJECTIVES, COMPETENCES BASED ID Objective Type of competences

to achieve O4 O8 O10 O12

Programming solutions based on socket technology Relationship between oriented object programming and distributed computing and messages passing. Combining them to provide remote invocation methods Test CORBA programming in order to compare it with the RMI approach. This comparison must take into account development tools and other factors Knowledge of the SOA architecture (web services) and their associated technologies (SOAP, WDSL, UDDI). The benefits must be demonstrated, guessing that an XML approach is used in the information interchange between these standards.

SKILL SKILL, APTITUDE KNOWLEDGE, APTITUDE KNOWLEDGE, SKILL

TABLE 2

THEMATIC BLOCKS FOR THE SUBJECT “SECURITY NETWORKS” Objectives Material/Activities Hours/Week O15, O16 O1 O2,O3,O4 O5,O6,O7

Material: None Activities: 1) Platform access 2) Initial survey to test initial knowledge 3) Forum presentation Material: Book “Security on Unix and Networks”, Antonio Villalón Huerta (Chapter 1, 24pp). Activities: 1) Forums participation 2) Assessment for block 1: questionnaire (10 questions, multiple items, one try). Material: Book “The Tao of Network Security Monitoring Beyond Intrusion Detection”, Chapter 1: The security process. Activities: 1) Forums participation 2) Assessment for block 2: questionnaire (20 questions, multiple items, one try). Material: Book “The Tao of Network Security Monitoring Beyond Intrusion Detection”, Part II: Network Security Monitoring Products. Activities: 1) Forums participation 2) Assessment for block 3: questionnaire (20 questions, multiple items, one try). 3) Activity: Install, configure and run network monitoring products (TCPDump, Ethereal, Snort, Sguil)

1/1 4.5/1 2/1-2 22/2-5

As it can be deduced from Table II, the sequencing for all thematic blocks produces a plan for a course that can be transferred from the lecturer to the students. Also, since the planning tool supports both a thematic and week format it is easy to translate the planning table to the planning tool, as is showed in the next section.

TRANSLATION IN A COURSE PLAN

In order to “translate” the planning table for the two subjects (Distributed computing and Security Networks), both tables are used to produce the following structure: • Block 1: Course summary. Provides the general

information about a course: access to the teaching guide (in PDF), general forum and the link to the initial survey. A brief guide is included explaining the steps to start the course.

• Blocks 2-8: Thematic blocks. Corresponding to the subject chapters, a direct mapping is done: o All the lecture notes are mapped to brief guidance

in each block. If it is necessary to add more information, links to HTML pages (static resources of planning) can be included. In figure 5 the course summary is shown as a block for the subject “Distributed computing”.

o The references to books, used in the course as basic material, are added as brief guidance. All the material inside the course repository (i.e., in electronic format) is include as document items (because all the electronic material is basically PDF or Word documents or source code files).

o Questionnaires defined in the planning table are mapped to Gradable test assessment, which only allow one try but have no start or finish date. The reason is that the students who undertake the course are people working and making them have fix hand in dates could lead to not all students meeting the deadlines.

o Forum participation. One thematic forum is created for each thematic block, and one thread is started to let students discuss issues regarding to each chapter. One forum item from a planning block is added to allow a quick link to a particular forum.

o Activities on practical exercises from the planning table are mapped to gradable tasks in the planning tool. The task allows start and finish dates to be defined for the file submission, and also, of course, provides instructions about the particular work to do and how submission should be undertaken.

In figure 6, the first three blocks according to the partial planning table of Table II for “Security networks” subject are shown.

Session S1D

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FIGURE 5 COURSE SUMMARY FOR “DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING”.

FIGURE 6

COURSE SUMMARY FOR “SECURITY NETWORKS”. Following these simple steps it is very easy to translate or map the planning table defined for the subjects into something similar to a plan course inside aLF. In order to get feedback about course quality, a final survey is provided to students (20 questions about all aspects involved in the online course). The final survey includes questions about general aspects of course, like:

1. Overall opinion of the subject (rank: 1 to 10) 2. Overall opinion about lecturers (rank: 1 to 10) 3. Quality of on-line material (rank: 1 to 10) 4. Quality of off-line material: books, papers, etc.

(rank: 1 to 10) 5. Appropriated questionnaires? (rank: 1 to 10) 6. Participation of lecturers in forums (rank: 1 to 10)

Furthermore, two questions focus on the planning tool and its impact on the way students have completed the on-line course. The questions were:

a) Do you think the planning page provides a useful guide for following the course?

b) Does the planning page provide a clear view of all the links to the course resources/activities?

Both questions were ranked between 1 and 10 points. In Table III a brief summary of responses is presented. As can be seen, the results are quite satisfactory, leading to the conclusion that the planning tool gives a clear structure of course, providing a direct mapping from the planning table to platform resources/activities and its aggregation in thematic blocks.

TABLE 3 SURVEY QUESTIONS ABOUT PLANNING COURSE

Subject (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) Distributed computing Security Networks

32 60

30 52

9.3 9.0

27 45

8.9 8.4

9.1 8.7

(1) Enrolled students (2) Number of responses to question a) (3) Mean value of rank for question a) (4) Number of responses to question b) (5) Mean value of rank for question a) (6) Mean value of rank for questions a) plus b)

The overall score (responses to the quality survey of students) was 9.0 for “Distributed computing” and 8.5 for “Security Networks”. The same survey was made the previous year, with an overall grade of 7.1 (“Distributed Computing”) and 7.6 (“Security Networks”). Taking in account that since the previous year, no major changes were introduced in the content of the course (same material, same questionnaires, same forums, etc.), it is seems clear that the quality improvement is due to the use of the planning tool (7.1 and 7.6 scores increase to 9.0 and 8.5, respectively). So, the use of this tool increases the satisfaction level of students in the evolution of the online course.

CONCLUSIONS

The planning tool from the aLF platform provides an easy way to map planning tables defined in teaching guides to resources/activities in the e-learning platform. Following a structured course facilitates the evaluation and learning objectives for students, providing them with a flexible mechanism to get the resources associated to the course and organized by blocks (in this case, thematic blocks). In the paper it has been shown that for two postgraduate courses, the students consider that the planning page is very important in order to adapt their studies to their personal approaches (family, work, etc.) and therefore, enable them to follow the course. Also, using the quality survey as a metric of student’s satisfaction, the overall score about courses have been increased due to the inclusion of this tool.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors wish to thank the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the National Plan R&D TIN2008-06083-

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C01/TSI and TIN2008-06083-C03/TSI “s-Labs: Integration of open services for remote and distributed virtual laboratories, reusable and safe”. The authors would also like to acknowledge the support of the Project 142788-2008-BG-LEONARDO-LMP mPSS – mobile Performance Support for Vocational Education and Training Project and IPLECS Project – Internet-based Performance-centered Learning Environment for Curricula Support Project ERASMUS 141944-LLP-2008-1-ES-ERASMUS-ECDSP. Finally, the authors would like to acknowledge the support provided by the e-Madrid Project, S2009/TIC-1650, “Investigación y Desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-learning en la Comunidad de Madrid”.

REFERENCES

[1] National Distance Learning University of Spain, http://www.uned.es

[2] T. Read, S. Ros, C. Rodrigo, R. Pastor and R. Hernández, “ The UNED ICT Architecture for “Virtual Attendance””, 23rd ICDE World Conference on Open Learning and Distance Education, Maastricht, Netherlands, 2009.

[3] R. Pastor, T. Read, S. Ros, R. Hernández and R. Hernández, “Virtual communities adapted to the EHEA in an enterprise distance e-learing based environment”. HCI-2009 International Conference on Human Computer Interaction, San Diego, California, USA, 2009.

[4] R. Pastor., S. Ros, R. Hernández., J.G. Boticario and T. Read, “Open source and e-learning in UNED”.

International Open Software Conference, Badajoz, Spain (2007)

[5] R. Pastor, A. Rodriguez, V. Aguilar and R. Hernández, “Blocks organizer for .LRN”. 7TH Openacs / .LRN Conference, Valencia, 2008.

[6] R. Pastor, A. Rodriguez, V. Aguilar and R. hernández, “Activities, Glossary and Multiple Template Support for the .LRN Content Tool”. 7TH Openacs / .LRN Conference, Valencia, 2008.

AUTHOR INFORMATION

Rafael Pastor, senior lecturer at the Spanish University for Distance Education. IEEE Member, rpastor@scc.uned.es Roberto Hernández, senior lecturer at the Spanish University for Distance Education. IEEE Senior Member. roberto@scc.uned.es Salvador Ros, senior lecturer at the Spanish University for Distance Education. IEEE Senior Member. sros@scc.uned.es Timothy Read, senior lecturer at the Spanish University for Distance Education, tread@lsi.uned.es. Manuel Castro, Professor at the Spanish University for Distance Education, IEEE Senior Member. mcastro@ieec.uned.es. Rocael Hernández, General Manager GES, Galileo University, roc@galileo.edu.