WHY TO INCORPORATE THE VIRTUAL PLATFORM MOODLE TO THE TEACHING LEARNING PROCESS (TLP)?

WHY TO INCORPORATE THE VIRTUAL PLATFORM MOODLE TO THE TEACHING LEARNING PROCESS (TLP)?

By: Fiorela Anai Fernandez Otoya
Professor assigned to the Department of Science Education

The implications of the new information and communication technologies in education take diverse  meanings  to discover and develop new ways of broaching the Teaching Learning Process (TLP) . The Virtuality is a concept, which although is not the same, is associated with this technological impact into the educational world, whose applicability brings a benefit to education and other sectors.

According to Alessi & Trollip (2008), the virtual platforms are used to develop and give the four modes of online courses that Chadwick distinguishes: fully developed courses, dependent courses, supplementary courses and information courses. The fully developed Web courses are those which use it as the only way for content presentation, students’ interaction and assessment. The other three types of courses are different due to the Web usage grade: the information courses only use it to present information about the course; the supplementary course use the Web as a material diffusion mean; finally, in the dependent courses, mean parts of them are available just in the Web.

Because of the difficulties that the differentiation between supplementary and dependent courses may arise, it usually distinguishes only two types of use of the Web as a teaching tool: as a support of traditional teaching and as a method to provide distance learning courses.

Lopez & Sein-Echaluce (2007), professor of Zaragoza-Spain University, conducted the study called MOODLE : Broadcast and functionality , highlighting Moodle as an excellent management system for e-learning.

Moodle, is a virtual learning environment designed to help educators to create quality online courses oriented to support to a social constructionist framework of education.

This virtual platform is freely distributed as Free Software under GNU Public License ( GPL ) thanks to this it has become one of the most widespread and used learning platforms, with a wide community of users. Nowadays Moodle is used in more than 7,000 Web sites around the world, it is presented in 160 countries and it has been translated into 75 languages ​​.

A total of 1,300 colleges and universities use it as a supplement of their face-to-face classes and globally, it has got over than two million users.
In three years, this platform of open code has taken the lead as a support of the face-to face teaching, blended learning and distance teaching, it means as a e-learning platform.

As Molist (2006) says , Moodle allows to distribute learning materials, to create and manage thematic discussions and bulletin boards, to pass questionnaires to the students, to assess tasks , to integrate Internet resources, create glossaries and dictionaries, to manage the time through an overall calendar of different subjects, it provides communication tools among students, such as instant messaging , it enables electronic tutoring in private or in a group, it calculates statistics , it manages the qualifications, etc.

To sum it up, the virtual platforms have been evolving at the same time of methodologies and technologies, especially those related to Internet, and they have begun to overcome the limitations that they suffered increasing hugely the expectations of the use and the grade of success.