Date

12/03/2010

Lecturer

Pilar Sancho Thomas

Summary

In general, today, an essential component of any professional's work is effectively coordinate their work with the members of a team. Consequently, training must adapt to new market demands. To do this, it is desirable that our students acquire and practice a range of social skills (Soft skills) and interpersonal skills that increase the efficiency of teamwork, including: leadership skills, communication skills, negotiation skills and the ability to coordinate the work of the members of a group. However, it is difficult to realize.

One reason is that it requires a strong involvement and a high level of engagement by students, who generally are more concerned about passing the course, by their actual training. Moreover, in recent years, in the context of university education in Spain, has been detecting an increase in passivity of the students, with dropout rates suffering a constant and
alarming increase.

The system core is a virtual collaborative learning system developed with three main objectives:

• Increase student motivation.
• Provide an environment in which students can exercise the practice of skills related to teamwork.
• Joining a previous context in which learning management is done through the Moodle LMS.

It is used as a classical approach to teaching basic PBL (Problem Based Learning) staged through a role play multi-player in a fantastic virtual world. The system architecture used as a back-end Moodle and the virtual world functions as an overlay to the interface. The system is being developed incrementally, with the aim of gradually testing multiple hypotheses in which teaching is based. It has been tested in different academic contexts over the past three academic years. The aim of the talk is to provide an outline of the main results and findings to date.

Author Biography

Pilar Sancho Thomas (UCM, http://www.e-ucm.es ) is Associate Professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Degree in Physics and PhD in computer science from the UCM, currently heads the CORE project in the group of e-ucm the Department of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence. Expert in e-learning technologies, in particular, his research focuses on collaborative virtual learning, virtual worlds and games based learning.

Slides

Videos

Seminario eMadrid: Aprendizaje 3D - Experiencias y resultados del sistema NUCLEO from eMadrid net on Vimeo.