<e-UCM> The e-Learning Research Group at UCM
<e-UCM> Projects Members Publications Intranet

The OdA-Virtual project

Full title: Learning Objects at the Virtual Campus: OdA-Virtual

Briefing

OdA-Virtual is a coordinated and multi-disciplinary project of applied research whose purpose is to study and investigate the processes and basic methodologies applicable to the development of tools supporting the construction of learning objects (Objetos de Aprendizaje, OdA) in distributed environments, and the construction and testing of prototypes of these tools in the context of the virtual campuses of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and of the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV).

An important goal of this project (UCM Computer Science subproject) is the development of the theoretical basis to support the definition and construction of that processes, methodologies and tools that must constitute the environment that will allow to professors and students to engage in the construction of OdA. This theoretical basis has been a fundamental part of the research effort of the research group at the Computer Science School of the UCM, where two doctoral dissertations about this subject have been already presented. The nucleus of this research is what we denominated the document oriented paradigm to the development of content-intensive applications. These document oriented paradigm is a methodology according to which applications are obtained as the result of processing the documents that describe the content and the most important aspects of the applications.

A second goal of this project (UPV subproject) is the analysis and evaluation of Web based e-learning systems. This goal includes the definition of criteria to analyze these systems, tools and OdA, and using these criteria to evaluate as a whole those systems, tools and OdA when deployed in a specific Web site. In order to carry out these tasks, partial and global models of evaluation will be used. Partial type models will focus on the evaluation of those aspects related to distributed computation, as Web technologies or fault tolerant systems. Global models will focus on those aspect based on quality control as it is the case of those based on the ISO norms and TQM (Total Quality Management).

The goals of the Linguistics School subproject (UCM) are: 1) the creation of didactic modules for the doctorate studies and thesis direction in Linguistics; 2) the development of a modular methodology allowing to analyze and to structure the Linguistic information in within the framework of a virtual campus and 3) encouraging the use of information and communication technologies in actual teaching. From the point of view of OdA development the purpose of this project is: 1) the analysis of linguistic information; 2) the elaboration of a modular methodology for teaching and for research; 3) the selection and testing of tools within the framework of a university virtual campus and 4) the development of a prototype

The Humanities School subproject (Archeology and History at UCM) has as its main goal the construction of OdA that could integrate the research and teaching materials generated by professors and students of this knowledge area within the framework of the Virtual Campus of the UCM. Specific goals of this subproject are: to define methodologies modeling different types of contents, to build hypermedia models and XML based markup languages specific for this knowledge area that allow to structure and tagging the contents of OdA in agreement with e-learning standards, so that it would be possible its semantic processing. To accomplish this goals the researchers in this subproject will carry out a line of research based on the reusability of the textual and graphical material that already exists in the Department of History of America II (museum, laboratory, archives and research and/or lecture notes) and in the research centres of the other members of the group (CNRS and University of Texas at San Antonio).