Partial Solution for a Problem of Developing a Large Number of eLearning Resources

Abstract

Through a careful organization of a teaching curriculum at their Department, the authors managed to organize nice and fruitful cooperation with their students in the eLearning area. In particular, what they find as the most positive result is the fact that an excellent cooperation between students and lecturers was developed. This cooperation lead to creation of digital learning objects by the students, as a result of the requirements for passing an exam dealing with eLearning. The authors' experience is limited to the students of the computer science study program, since only a small number of students of other study programs elected this course, but the number of students they observed is large enough for qualitative conclusions. Based on a static teaching material, students developed several types of eLearning resources for various subjects, not restricted to computer science courses. Developed materials (usually) required some additional work to make them fully usable as a part of university courses. Still, generally, all of the technical work was performed, a large part of texts, images, assessment questions, and other learning objects were created, and resources typically were very usable after some additional polishing. Yet, what is probably of even a greater value is the fact that the authors managed to join several important things within this one course. First of all, and probably the most important, students were introduced to principles and methodology of eLearning in some real situation, preparing some practically usable material, thus being able to see all of the problems they might encounter in the future. Secondary, as a result, the authors received a lot of draft versions of teaching materials to improve it further, thus relaxing efforts for eLearning material creation. Finally, the most creative part of the result is the fact that these resources introduced the authors to different, sometimes rather interesting views on problems and materials in question, or on teaching methodology. Essentially it offers them new ideas, notions, and concepts to work with.