Implementation model for new technologies in online education

Abstract

The new approaches to higher education in terms of teaching methods are increasingly targeted towards virtual environments. The first benefit would be the access to educational resources, independent of location and time. With the wide spread of mobile technologies, from mobile phones and tablets that support content distribution, social media communication and collaboration, to teaching methods and technologies, teaching and learning must be adapted to these new challenges in online higher education. Therefore, courses must be redesigned and structured in order to be accessible to individual study. The paper is focused on developing a template for online courses, starting from designing the main learning objects as resources and activities, including teaching materials, online assessments, questionnaires and communication-interaction tools such as webinars, forums and chat. As a good practice example, we present the results from the application of a course evaluation questionnaire, in terms of structure, content, interaction between participants. Based on these results a comparative analysis is made between online and blended learning, regarding the fact that there are a lot of constraints that affect the way blended courses are developed, which can compromise their quality. In conclusion, we present the main benefits of using this method of learning. As future work, we make some remarks about improvements regarding the system and methods.