A NEW TOOL FOR COURSE DESCRIPTION USABLE IN E-LEARNING PLATFORMS DEVELOPING

Abstract

Setting up an academic programme is a complex task that must consider many data that obey specific rules, establish certain relationships between the elements involved, and respect a well-defined hierarchy. The central object of an academic programme is the course that plays the role of a brick in a building: it must fit perfectly between its neighbours that form a layer, which together with the lower and upper layers, must give the shape of a unitary system. The course, being the elementary unit of the academic programme, must be very accurately defined by its type, category, level, number and type of activities, number of hours allocated to each of it, number of credits, intended learning outcomes, and others. All these must give a full and balanced description of the course that depends on various data collected from different sources. The present paper proposes a new original tool, which works as a template file that aids the course designer in providing a complete and coherent description of a course, respecting some previously defined conditions. The tool’s novelty consists of a table-shaped document that combines selected-from-a-list, calculated, open inputs, and verification fields that signalize any error occurrence and provide hints for their correction in the process of course description. Using this tool, the course designer can easily provide an error-free course description, combining data collected from interconnected tables and adding specific pieces of information, so that it can be later used in e-learning platforms via import/export files.