User:Gregorio Robles

General

Name of your institution: Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
Type of your institution: traditional HEI

Context

We had been working with student blogs for several years with great success, but some issues where too much time-taking and not satisfactory from the pedagogic point of view. In this sense, we saw that students had to surf through a large amount of links and webs to see their fellow students entries. On the other hand, students were very active writing, and sometimes commenting other student's blogs, but we did not have any way of knowing how they rated other's blogs. Finally, the time that we lecturers had to devote to the activity was too much: following the students was ardous and evaluating a very time-consuming activity.

Objective

What purpose and competences will be achieved?

Methodology

We built a software tool called FAVS, which is free/libre/open source software, that allows to have all blogs of the class grouped into a single site, as if all of them were one blog by itself. FAVS allows registration of users, so that lecturers do not have to perform this task. By embedding a Javascript into any HTML, the planet can be accessed from any other site easily (including in learning management systems as Moodle or WebCT). In addition to the entries, FAVS allows students to evaluate the entries of their fellow students by means of a Facebook-I-like-it mechanism; this way of co-evaluation boosts participation and allows lecturers to know the blogs that are better considered by the students.

Assessment

We have tried FAVS for over 4 years in over a dozen different environments, from secondary school to masters degrees. It has been used in traditional HEI, but in complete on-line environments such as the Open Univeristy of Catalonia. In addition to traditional blogs, it can also use Tweeter and other micro-blogging sites.

User-Generated Content experience

Short description of the experience: To be written

Objective

Which is UGC activity/ies objective?: To be written

Users

Any type of learner can use it. We have tried it from >12years.

Methodology

How it is developed? Includes technological tools: To be written. FAVS can be used (and downloaded) at http://favs.homelinux.org

How did you address quality-related issues?

Describe how you made sure that the generated content will be of good quality or what lessons you learned with regards to quality of students' work.: To be written
See here an example of the Quality Framework


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