A Look at the pedagogical follow-up of e-learning courses at university

Abstract

A presentation of evaluative research, this article discusses the quality of pedagogical guidance carried out for eLearning course projects by the Centre «Nouvelles Technologies et Enseignement» at Fribourg. This guidance is based on a continuous process of formative evaluation done with the students and teachers involved in the development of eLearning courses. By stimulating participation of the projects’ actors, the evaluation aims to improve the didactical quality of the resulting courses. The main tools of this stimulation are questionnaires about the students’ perceptions of eLearning and discussions with the teachers about their courses. We first show the improvements made possible through the process of guidance used at the University of Fribourg during the period 2000-2003 with three projects of the national program Swiss Virtual Campus: Antiquit@as (Ancient History, first and second year students), «A Web-based Training in Embryology» (Medicine, first and second year students) and «European Law Online» (European Law, third and fourth year students). Then we discuss the possible improvements of the continuous process of formative evaluation itself.