Blended versus face-to-face: comparing student performance in a therapeutics class

Therapeutics is a very complex subject for every pharmacy student, since it requires the application of knowledge from several other disciplines. The study of therapeutics is often done in case-based learning in order to promote reflective thinking and give a scenario as real as possible. The objective of this study was to compare student performance between faceto-face (n = 54) and blended learning (n = 56) approaches to the teaching of therapeutics. They can confirm that there are statistically significant differences (p < 0.05) between the final exam scores from both groups, being that the b learning group achieved higher scores. Blended learning seems to be an effective way to teach therapeutics, following pre established teaching methods, and above all, does not negatively affect student performance. It also provides new learning environments and strategies, and promotes the development of new skills such as learning and collaborating online, which may be relevant in a networked knowledge society.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Feedback authoring possibilities in web-based learning systems

This paper surveys and analyses the feedback authoring possibilities in online assessment modules of the most popular Learning Management Systems (LMS) including Moodle, Sakai, and Blackboard. We consider the problem of authoring and support of tailored and personalized feedback and demonstrate how it has been (or could be potentially) addressed in these systems

Tailoring of feedback in online assessment: Lessons learnt

Feedback plays an important role in the learning process. Particularly, the functions of the elaborated feedback (EF) in online assessment may include assisting students in understanding their mistakes and misconceptions, motivating the student for further learning, suggesting directions for improvement, and others. During the academic years 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 we have conducted a series of online assessments of students (as integral parts of several bachelor and master courses) and have studied the possibilities of tailoring the feedback (presented to a student as a result of his/her response to questions of an online test) taking into account the individual learning styles (LS), certitude in a response and correctness of this response. In this paper we summarize our major findings from the assessments data and lessons learnt from the organization of online assessments with tailored feedback. We also discuss the advantages and limitations of our studies, and outline the prominent directions for further research

Adaptivity in GRAPPLE: Adaptation in any way you like (Poster)

GRAPPLE is an EU funded IST FP7 project that brings together a group of researchers into adaptive learning technology and environments and developers of learning management systems (LMSs), in order to offer adaptive learning as a standard feature of future LMSs. This paper presents the adaptation engine used in GRAPPLE, and explains why we consider it to be a truly general-purpose adaptive learning environment (ALE). In particular the paper describes how the core adaptation component (or engine) can be configured to perform any kind of adaptation to any type of XML document, and how it is designed to communicate and work with other systems, in particular with (different) LMSs