Virtual education in traditional universities: experience in the University of Castile-la Mancha

Abstract

Virtual teaching has become a common tool in our traditional universities. The new learning methodologies for the students, together with new pedagogical techniques in the context of the new European Space for Higher Education, have meant that both the Internet and the new information and communications technologies (ICT) have become options for teaching that combine various pedagogical resources and make traditional classroom-based teaching and the new virtual teaching compatible. These new teaching systems can control both the time students spend learning and the amount of work they do, thereby offering valuable information to the teaching-learning processes. Higher education in traditional universities is being truly transformed: the successful integration of ICT into the teaching opens up new possibilities for the contents on the syllabus, and offers the students themselves the chance to gain new skills in this area. The current work analyses the empirical experiment that the authors have carried out in the University of Castile-La Mancha, from the “Red-C@mpus” platform to the virtual learning environment called “Campus Virtual”. In both cases, students and lecturers interact asynchronously in an environment
that is designed to facilitate the teaching-learning process and ensure that the proposed objectives can be achieved.