TOWARDS AN OPEN LEARNING ECOSYSTEM BASED ON OPEN
ACCESS REPOSITORIES, CURRICULA-BASED INDICES AND
LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
R. Fernández-Flores 1 and B. Hernandez-Morales 2
DGTIC, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (MEXICO)
Depto. de Ingeniería Metalúrgica, Facultad de Química, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México (MEXICO)
1
2
Abstract
The advantages of blended-learning have been well documented. A critical component of a blendedlearning strategy is a Learning Management System (LMS) because it allows the teacher to direct the
students’ activities and track their advances. However not all institutions have the resources to
develop learning objects that may be used on a daily basis nor are they aware of how to fully exploit
LMS’s to the best of their capabilities; in fact, in many occasions a LMS is used as a local repository of
digital resources even though they are not designed for that purpose. In this regard, it is important to
work towards building institutional and even national repositories for digital content and to develop
open-access learning ecosystems. Thus, in this paper we describe a structure that has been used for
teaching a Heat Transfer course (at the undergraduate level) under a blended learning strategy that
may be used as a model to build an ecosystem based on open access repositories and an LMS. It
consists of three elements: 1) a freely-available LMS (in our case, Moodle) which served as a link
between the students and course materials; 2) a curricula-based index (“Red Universitaria de
Aprendizaje”, RUA) that resides at our university but it is open-access; and 3) institutional repositories
of learning resources which are also open-access. The materials in the repository are: guides to
learning activities, transport phenomena simulators and lectures.
In addition to serve as a model to build institutional ecosystems to support blended-learning, the
structure described in the paper has the added advantage that any external university or institute can
freely access the resources from a local LMS. It should be emphasized that the use of an LMS to
direct the course activities and follow the students’ progress is very important and, therefore,
prospective users must be aware of this point.
As an example of the advantages that the proposed structure may offer, in this paper we present an
analysis of the relationship between usage statistics and the final grade obtained by students that
were enrolled in the course during the last semester.
Keywords: LMS, open-access, connectivism, collaborative learning.
1
INTRODUCTION
IT has become ubiquitous in many institutions of different levels throughout the world. However, there
are significant differences in economic resources among countries and even within a given country
which makes the need to develop strategies to lessen the economic and technical burden of some
institutions interested in using IT compelling [1]. Thus, in this paper we describe an ecosystem based
on: 1) a freely-available learning management system (LMS); 2) an open-access curricula-based
index of learning materials and 3) open-access institutional repositories.
A Learning Management System (LMS) may be defined as a set of software tools that allow “materials
management”, “interactive teaching” and “peer learning” [2]. As pointed out by Rubin et al. [3], the
selection of the LMS as well as the specific tools to be used are critical in the success of a fully online
or a blended course.
Because of the large number of learning materials available through Internet it is necessary to index
them so the students and teachers can locate them easily. One strategy is based on indexing the
materials according to each course´s syllabus. This is a “natural” approach in that many similar
courses in different institutions will have at least a core of syllabus units. Through indexing not only
there is a simple way to access learning materials but also helps avoiding redundant efforts.
To complete a desirable ecosystem, there is a need to have institutional or even national repositories.
This is particularly true for countries where it is difficult to have access to large amounts of disk space.
In this regard, it is unfortunate that, in some cases, LMS’s are also being used as repositories, which
is not one of the functions they were designed for.
2
METHODOLOGY
The Heat Transfer course is part of the Metallurgical Chemical Engineering undergraduate degree
offered at the School of Chemistry of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). The course
is taught during 16 weeks, with two sessions of 3 hours each. In the case reported, the first session
was used to cover theoretical aspects while, during the second session, the students used interactive
simulators and/or built worksheets to study corresponding applied cases.
To teach the course with a blended-learning methodology, a body of learning materials have been
built over the last few terms. The learning materials currently available for the students are: 1)
Microsoft PowerPoint presentations to support the theoretical sessions; 2) interactive simulators built
using Mathematica and 3) Microsoft Excel worksheets. The materials are indexed in an open-access
university-wide index called RUA (“Red Universitaria de Aprendizaje”) [4], and hosted in institutional
repositories such as MediaCampus [5] and “Repositorio Universitario de la DGTIC” [6], both residing
at UNAM; the student interaction with the materials is controlled via the open-access LMS Moodle [7].
The interlinkage between the three components of the learning ecosystem is schematically
represented in Figure 1. Previous to the first weekly session, the students have access (through RUA
via the LMS) to the corresponding Microsoft PowerPoint presentation so that they can study it before
the actual lecture. After the lecture there is a quiz, also available through RUA via the LMS, that the
students must respond (uploading the answers via the LMS) before the second weekly session in
order to be allowed to continue their work during the week.
During the session at the computer laboratory, the students download a document that guides the
work to be done during that session. To accomplish the objectives set forth in the guide the students
either download an interactive simulator or build a Microsoft Excel worksheet; they can also consult
the presentation that covers the theoretical aspects of a given topic at any time as well as any other
material available in Internet. All of these activities are directed through the LMS that serves as a
guide to the curricula-based index which in turn directs the students to the learning materials.
Referring to Fig. 1, the LMS starts the cycle as it serves as the entry point for the students; they are
then directed, through a guide in the LMS, to the curricula-based index in which they select the
required materials for a given task. It should be pointed out that the index allows them to download the
materials without directly going into the particular repository where the materials are actually stored.
Repos
-itory
Index
LMS
Figure 1. Schematic representation of the three components of the ecosystem.
A screenshot of the guide for the application session on heat transfer by radiation is shown in Fig. 2.
The guide has the following components: 1) application session number (in this example: “11”); 2) the
topic (“Radiación”); 3) a list of the outcomes for the session (“Objetivos”); 4) a set of four problems;
and 5) a reminder to answer a questionnaire about the materials used during the session.
Figure 2. A screenshot of the guide for the application session on heat transfer by radiation.
Following the instructions given in the guide, the students would go to RUA and access the learning
materials for the topic of interest. As an example, in Fig. 3 the learning materials available for Unit 3
(heat transfer by conduction under unsteady-state conditions) are displayed [8]. There are two types of
materials: 1) applications (“Aplicaciones”) and 2) documents (“Documentos”). The former are
simulators built using Mathematica [9] while the latter are the Microsoft PowerPoint presentations used
in the first weekly session. Under “Aplicaciones” there are also few Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
Figure 3. A screenshot of the curricula-based institutional index (RUA) showing the first three course
units [8]. Links to learning materials for Unit 3 are displayed as “Aplicaciones” and “Documentos”, both
in white colour.
The simulators were designed to have full interactivity and allow presenting the results graphically
because the principal objective of this course is to compute the distribution of temperature (and other
related quantities) within a body; in other occasions, the focus is on computing the variation of
temperature with time. In this regard, it should be pointed out that traditionally, the students are asked
to calculate a single value and not the full distribution because it takes time to do so manually, even
with the help of a calculator. An example of the simulators is shown in Fig. 4. It corresponds to heat
flow by conduction through a plane wall under steady-state conditions. A detailed description of this
simulator was giving elsewhere [10]; thus, only the salient features will be presented here to give
context.
The student may choose among four different types of calculations (temperature distribution, heat flux
distribution, heat flow distribution, and resistance to heat flow) by selecting the corresponding tab
(“Temperatura”, “Flux de calor”, “Flujo de calor” y “Resistencia”). For a given calculation, there are a
number of variables whose value is selected sliding a rule that appears in front of the variable; the
student may also type the value of interest directly in a box that is activated by clicking the “+” sign.
Each simulator is used within the context of a list of activities that the student downloads from RUA via
the LMS. Typically, the activities involve changing the value of a given parameter to study the system
response or changing values until a desired response is obtained. In both cases the answer is readily
obtained because the student does not need to do any calculation by hand. Thus, one can expect a
more thorough understanding of the system behaviour by dedicating time to study the response of the
system to a set of changes in the variables instead of using that time to do calculations by hand.
Finally, it must be pointed out that the students do not need to have a Mathematica license because
the simulators can be run using the freely-available Wolfram CDF Player [11].
Figure 4. A screenshot of a Mathematica-based simulator for heat flow through a wall [9].
At UNAM we currently have a campus-wide Mathematica license and, therefore, any professor or
student can develop similar materials. However, that is not be the case at other institutions. A major
benefit of the proposed structure is that RUA is an open-access index; therefore, a professor at
another institution can setup his/her activity guide via a local LMS and use the index to access
materials that he/she may not have the opportunity to develop. This also permits open collaboration
because those professors, and their students, may submit requests for developing new case studies
or point out difficulties while using the simulators.
3
RESULTS
When blended-learning is used to teach a course, the ways in which both the students and the teacher
interact are very different when compared with a traditional course. Those changes necessarily impact
on the learning process and, therefore, it is necessary to understand the link between successful
students (as measured by their grades alone) and the way in which those students behaved during the
course. In this regard, there are reports in the literature (see, for example [12]) recommending the use
of metrics to quantitatively characterize students’ usage of the materials in a blended-learning
environment.
Thus, as part of the results that may be obtained using the structure described in this paper, in this
section we present some examples of statistics regarding students’ working habits, which may be
collected using the LMS. The results are presented as number of times that each student interacted
with the learning materials; in the remainder of the text we will refer to this quantity as “number of
clicks”. The total number of clicks during the course was 12925. It should be pointed out that this and
many other statistics are readily obtained from within the LMS.
The distribution of clicks by time of the day (for all students in the course) is shown in Fig. 5. Given
that the work at the computing lab was on Thursdays from 5:30 to 8:30 pm, it is not surprising that the
frequency of clicks is much higher during that period. It is interesting to note that some students
entered the LMS very late at night and very early in the morning.
Figure 5. Number of clicks (by time of the day) for all students enrolled in the course.
In order to figure out a possible relationship between the number of clicks for a given student and the
grade he/she obtained at the end of the course, six students were selected: two of them (labelled as
“T1” and “T2”) had a high grade, other two (labelled as “M1” and “M2”) obtained a medium grade, and
the remaining two (labelled “L1” and “L2”) failed the course.
In Fig. 6, the distribution of clicks throughout the week, excluding Thursdays, is plotted for those six
students. Clearly, the students that ended up having a high grade were active throughout the week
while the two students that failed did not work with the course materials every day. Even though this is
an expected result, using the structure proposed in this paper has the advantage of allowing the
professor to quantify the work done by the students.
Figure 6. Number of clicks throughout the week, excluding Thursdays, for each one of the six students
selected.
4
CONCLUSIONS

There is a need to coordinate efforts among institutions using IT such that the ones with fewer
resources may benefit from efforts already done by the ones with more resources. In
particular, the latter should develop digital learning materials that must be open-access.

Curricula-based indices offer a natural way to find digital learning materials.

LMS´s must not be only used as digital repositories.

Usage statistics obtained with an LMS that was used during the semester allowed
characterizing students involvement with the course and relating final grades to the degree of
involvement.

The database generated by the LMS throughout a course offers many more possibilities than
the ones shown in this paper.
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