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of this paper, in relation to the self-assessment
digital material prepared for the Decision Support
Systems-DSS course, which is a mandatory course
for third-year students at the Department of
Production Engineering and Management.
The E-Class has a special service (exercises) for
academic staff, which is optionally activated so that
the tutor can prepare exercises in the form of
questions-answers for the students. With regard to
the DSS course, the digital material in the form of
self-assessment exercises was divided into groups of
thematic modules, according to the detailed
curriculum and in the form of multiple-choice or
matching or fill-in-blank questions and answers.
This effort aims to enhance teaching of the course,
familiarize students with the further features of the
platform, improve students‟ knowledge through self-
assessment and support digital interaction for
educational purposes. However, despite the effort
made at the beginning of each semester by the tutors
to instruct all students attending the course in using
the features of E-Class (2-hour presentation and
relevant notes) and despite the effort to develop,
improve, and update the self-assessment material on
an annual basis it becomes evident that students used
it only to download the material of the course and
hardly ever used the self-assessment feature. The
support team of the course noticed that the self-
assessment material is scarcely used, mainly near the
date of examinations, as a source of possible
questions for the examinations.
In the light of these findings we organized a pilot
seminar, in the form of „experiment‟ involving a
group of twenty-seven volunteer undergraduate
students. The main goal was to utilize the digital
material. Therefore, we prepared a seminar based on
cooperative learning that would use different
techniques for the teaching of the same course. This
seminar was held on different days and hours than
the course, and was attended by 27 volunteers. The
idea of the seminar was to integrate the digital
material in the form of 10-minute group exercises
with the active participation of students. It intended
to measure the final performance of participants
compared to non-participants and to evaluate their
preference in five different activities, one of which
was based on the digital material from E-class. In
particular, the five activities combined with effective
speaking/writing (communication skills) and
teamworking skill, were the following: individual
written assignments (at home), oral presentation
with PowerPoint (prepared at home), group research
projects by 2-3 persons (prepared at home during the
semester; a very well-known alternative given as a
project in the context of the course, and followed by
non-participants in the seminar), active participation
in a discussion in class (questions-answers) and E-
Class exercises (10-minute written exercises in
groups of two in class).
The learning objective of the seminar was not
different from the objective specified in the detailed
curriculum of the course. It is noted that at
undergraduate level, effective writing/speaking and
teamworking are some of the transferable skills
suggested by a large number of researchers (Kemp
and Seagraves, 1995; Venetsanopoulos, 2004;
Baldwin, Cahn, Forman, Lehmann and Wischmeyer,
1979; Caroll, Markauskaite and Calvo, 2008). Both
teams of students (seminar/project) had the
advantage of a final oral examination. In particular,
the second team of students consisted of those who
had chosen to prepare a written research project in
groups of 2 or 3 persons instead of participating in
the seminar. Both teams of students who opted to
participate either in the seminar or the project would
be given an overall performance grade based on:
their performance in the laboratory, their
performance at the seminar (27 persons) or their
grade for the project (57 persons) and their
performance during the oral examination on the
course curriculum.
2 SEMINAR DETAILS
The seminar was held in a classroom equipped with
a round table, in order to promote equality and
familiarity and to avoid the sense of „superiority‟ of
the tutor, as is the case when teaching from the desk,
aiming to encourage participation. The seminar
extended over seven sessions of two hours each,
covering Information Technology Systems and
Decisions Theory, within the educational goals of
the course. The tutor assumed also the role of
facilitator of knowledge not authenticity, coordinator
not transmitter of knowledge, who learns through
the students‟ experiences (Felder, 1996). The role of
students changed from a passive receiver to an equal
participant in the building of knowledge, a producer
of knowledge who draws from previous experiences;
they now assumed an active and interactive, not
passive role. In brief, an effort was made to perform
a more student-centered learning process aiming at
the development of students both at knowledge and
at skills level, and less focused on the usual one-
sided knowledge-based approach which is focused
on the principle of transferring knowledge from the
tutor to the student. In addition, we took into account
EVALUATING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF A PILOT SEMINAR ON COOPERATIVE LEARNING IN AN
ENGINEERING COURSE
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