Inovacije u Nastavi (Sep 2020)

University teachers’ attitudes towards using moodle platform in teaching philological academic courses

  • Borislava R. Eraković,
  • Vesna S. Lazović

DOI
https://doi.org/10.5937/inovacije2003043E
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 33, no. 3
pp. 43 – 57

Abstract

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Moodle educational platform, which is based on socio-constructivist epistemology, is no longer a novelty in university-level teaching. The question is, however, to what extent the potential of the platform for collaborative work and the transfer of the central role from teachers to students has been operationalized in practice. Given that a significant part of the curricula of the philological academic courses involves writing texts, encouraging interaction among students on these tasks, which are usually performed independently, can be quite challenging. In this paper we examine the current practices in using Moodle at philological studies, in order to: identify the types of tasks used for achieving different teaching objectives, (b) analyze the reasons why other types of tasks are neglected and (c) determine the extent to which the platform is used for encouraging active participation and interaction among students. We present the results of the online questionnaire distributed to 44 teachers and associates at six universities from Serbia, Slovenia, and Croatia during the summer semester of 2017/2018. As the obtained data are both quantitative and qualitative, we applied a combined data processing method – descriptive analysis and nonparametric tests: chi-square test, McNemar's test, and Kruskal-Wallis test. According to the results, Moodle is used in philological courses for faster communication, more transparent access to teaching materials, and monitoring students' activities, therefore, more as a support to predominantly transmissive than collaborative teaching. To make Moodle more widely used as a support to teaching based on socio-constructivist epistemology, training in its application should include learning about the benefits of this approach to teaching. The obtained results indicate that there is a need to develop and test new activities which support peer cooperation on textual tasks.

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