ASSURING THE QUALITY OF THE PRACTICUM IN THE EHEA

WITH MOODLE AND GOOGLE DOCS

Design of a Tool for Facilitating the Practicum Monitoring

Xavier Perramon

, Josepa Alemany

and Laura Panad`es

Department of Information and Communic. Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Roc Boronat 138, Barcelona, Spain

Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Ramon Trias Fargas 25–27, Barcelona, Spain

Department of Law, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Ramon Trias Fargas 25–27, Barcelona, Spain

Keywords:

Practicum, Quality Assurance, Monitoring Process, Moodle, Google Docs, EHEA.

Abstract:

The introduction of the European Higher Education Area has a methodological impact on most university

courses, but in some cases the main change comes from the access of a larger number of students to the

courses. Speciﬁcally, the Practicum used to be an option for only a few students in most degrees, but after the

EHEA its deployment will be much more generalised. In order not to degrade the quality of the Practicum

monitoring process, measures should be taken for facilitating the task of Practicum supervisors. In this paper

we present the implementation of a software tool designed to this end. A ﬁrst version of the tool is based on the

well-known Moodle e-learning platform. Since we detected some problems due to the coexistence of different

versions of Moodle, we introduced other emerging technologies, such as cloud computing, and in particular

Google Docs. We show that the combination of Moodle and Google Docs allows an efﬁcient monitoring of

the Practicum and helps to guarantee its quality, regardless of the version of Moodle in use.

1 INTRODUCTION

The work presented in this paper is part of a wider

project developed at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

aimed at adapting the Practicum to the European

Higher Education Area (EHEA).

The deﬁnition of Practicum in the context of this

work is a course intended to make students put in

practise the theory they have learnt, to be developed

typically as an internship in the professional environ-

ment of a welcoming institution, i.e. a company, a

public administration, or any other kind of organi-

sation. The beneﬁts of the Practicum in the learn-

ing process have been described in different models

(Jaques, Gibbs and Rust, 1993), and in particular in

Kolb’s (1984) “experiential learning”.

At UPF the Practicum system is independent for

each of the 12 degrees conducted in its faculties. This

represents a challenge for the coordination of the tran-

sition to the new EHEA scenario.

The project for adapting the Practicum to the

EHEA comprises both a study of the status before

the EHEA and a forecast of the changes that will be

necessary to adapt the Practicum to the new require-

ments, mainly student-centred learning and employa-

bility, i.e. training that meets labour market demands.

The greatest impact of the new Practicum system

will be a signiﬁcant increase in the number of students

taking this type of course. In most studies at UPF, the

Practicum will cease to be an option for a small frac-

tion of the roll and will become a widespread activity,

or even mandatory in some degrees. This expansion

of the Practicum to the masses should not be detri-

mental to its quality. In particular, special considera-

tion should be given to the monitoring and assessment

of the student’s activities during the Practicum.

Clearly, the monitoring of tens or even hundreds

of students’ professional practices a year by each

supervisor should not negatively affect its quality.

Our solution is the implementation of Information

and Communication Technologies (ICT), which facil-

itates the task of academic supervisors.

One of the technological measures that can be

taken is the use of an e-learning platform for the

Practicum management. In our case, the use of

Moodle is a natural choice because there is already

an institutional platform available at UPF based on

Moodle.

The implementation of e-learning technologies

based on “the Cloud” is an issue that is currently un-

175

Perramon X., Alemany J. and Panadès L..

ASSURING THE QUALITY OF THE PRACTICUM IN THE EHEA WITH MOODLE AND GOOGLE DOCS - Design of a Tool for Facilitating the Practicum

Monitoring.

DOI: 10.5220/0003922901750178

In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2012), pages 175-178

ISBN: 978-989-8565-07-5

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

der development. To the best of our knowledge, there

is no conceptual general framework yet. Most of the

literature is about cases of study inspired by “trial and

error” methodologies, with no bibliographic consoli-

dated literature background.

2 THE STARTING POINT: THE

PRACTICUM AT UPF BEFORE

THE EHEA

At the initial stage of our project, in 2009 we per-

formed an analysis of the status of the Practicum

courses in each of the 12 degree programmes offered

at UPF. One of the goals of our project is to assess the

changes introduced by the EHEA, by carrying out a

similar study after the EHEA has been fully deployed,

and comparing the outcome of both analyses.

The results of the initial analysis showed a wide

disparity of characteristics among the Practicum of

the different degrees, in terms of duration of the prac-

tices, number of credits assigned, etc. A detailed ex-

planation of these results can be found in Alemany,

Perramon and Panad`es (2012).

With regard to the monitoring of the practices, we

identiﬁed four basic models followed at UPF:

(a) In one of the degrees (Humanities) there was no

Practicum at all.

(b) In other degrees there was a small number of po-

sitions available, allowing an intensivemonitoring

of the students.

tions. Around 90% of the students in the last

term could take a Practicum course. However,

the scarce resources available, mainly the limited

number of tutors supervising the practices, im-

plied a low intensity monitoring of the Practicum.

(d) Finally, there were degreesin which the Practicum

was an essential part of the students’ comprehen-

sive training. Consequentially, their selection and

monitoring were done tightly and thoroughly.

Monitoring Practicum students is a twofold pro-

cess. On one hand the in-house tutor at the company

or external organisation is in charge of the supervi-

sion of the student’s day-to-day work. And on the

other hand the academic tutor at the university is re-

sponsible for periodically overseeing this work and

checking that it fulﬁls its educational objectives.

3 HOW THE EHEA IS

CHANGING THE PRACTICUM

AT UPF

The deployment of the EHEA at UPF started ofﬁ-

cially with a transitional period in the academic years

2007/08 for some degrees and 2008/09 for the rest,

one year before the maximum date set by the Bologna

Process (EHEA, 2010). Since the Practicum usually

occurs in the fourth year of the studies, 2011/12 marks

the start of the bulk of external practices developed in

accordance with the EHEA directives.

The results of our work comparing the Practicum

at UPF before and after the EHEA will not be avail-

able until we repeat the analysis we performed in

2009, but we observe that the four models we iden-

tiﬁed are converging into just two: model (a), i.e. no

Practicum at all, is no longer a model because all de-

grees have now a Practicum, and models (b) and (c)

are becoming the same because the number of stu-

dents of model (b) degrees is increasing, but the num-

ber of tutors is not augmenting equally. Therefore,

this leaves us with two Practicum models: one with

many students but a low intensity monitoring, and

the original model (d) with a tighter monitoring for a

large number of students. And in the long term we can

anticipate that every Practicum will move to the latter

model of high quality monitoring for a high number

of students, which is of course the desirable situation.

One signiﬁcant change that the EHEA is intro-

ducing is therefore the extension of the Practicum

to the great majority of students. In some cases the

Practicum will be mandatory, so that it will have to be

taken by 100% of graduating students.

To ensure the quality of the Practicum, a method

has to be used to facilitate the tutors’ supervision

tasks. Otherwise the job of the tutors might become

impractical. And the use of computer tools is of great

help to this end.

4 A PROPOSAL FOR

MONITORING A LARGE

NUMBER OF PRACTICES

Part of our project consisted in developing a tool

speciﬁcally designed for monitoring the Practicum in

the new context of the EHEA. In line with the princi-

ple that the Practicum is now a subject like any other,

and since Moodle is currently the generic platform

used at UPF for course administration, we started by

implementing a Moodle module for the Practicum.

The main design goal of the system we imple-

CSEDU2012-4thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

176

mented can be summarised as making the tutors’ life

easier when monitoring the possibly large number of

students they will be in charge of. In particular:

• There should be little or no difference between the

assessment of the Practicum and of other courses.

• The tutors’ work in reviewing the students’

achievements should be as easy and straightfor-

ward as possible.

4.1 The Solution based on Moodle

Our Practicum monitoring tool consists of a Moodle

module that offersdifferent functionalities to the users

depending on their role within the Moodle system.

• Students. They can elaborate periodic reports on

their activities, receive reminders or notiﬁcations,

interact with the tutors, and prepare the ﬁnal re-

port based on the contents of the periodic reports.

• External tutors. They can read the student’s peri-

odic and ﬁnal reports and the academic tutor’s re-

ports, add comments, and write their own reports.

• Academic tutors. This proﬁle has the same func-

tions as the external tutor, and in addition can val-

idate the reports and is responsible for the ﬁnal

assessment of the student.

As with any Moodle course, there is an additional

role, the course administrator, who sets the general

parameters for the Practicum like the periodicity of

the partial reports, e.g. weekly or biweekly, etc.

Depending on the conﬁguration set by the admin-

istrator, in each of the periods there will be at least two

types of Moodle activities: the student report for that

period, and a survey with a number of short questions

that the tutors can use to evaluate how the student’s

activities are fulﬁlling the Practicum objectives.

Our Practicum course also includes these items:

• A forum for exchanging students’ experiences.

• A diary where students can record their personal

experiences, e.g. prior to preparing their formal

reports, and which is not subject to assessment.

• A glossary where students can add deﬁnitions of

terms used in their speciﬁc Practicum activities.

• A ﬁnal survey for students to evaluate their overall

experience during the Practicum.

• The ﬁnal report of the Practicum that all students

must ﬁll out mandatorily. This will be the basis

for the tutors’ assessment of the Practicum.

One section of the ﬁnal report, which we call the

summary report, is generated automatically from

the periodic reports, and consists of the aggregate

of activities done by the student in each period.

Thus it will be possible to know e.g. how many

hours the student has spent in each type of activity.

The communication between the Practicum users,

i.e. student and tutors, is done through the usual

mechanisms provided by the Moodle platform.

After testing our module, the next step was inte-

gration into the institutional Moodle system at UPF.

At this point, however, we found an obstacle due

to the way the Moodle platform is deployed at our

university. Some institutions, ours amongst them,

use a heavily modiﬁed version of Moodle tailored to

the singularities of their schooling system. When a

new version of the mainstream Moodle is published,

resynchronisation of the customised installation with

this new version may represent a non-trivial task.

In these cases, updating the Moodle installation

is usually deferred until the local changes have been

adapted or it has been checked that they do not break

the new version of the system. By the time this task

is completed, it is possible that a newer major version

of Moodle has come out, so that the local system will

be constantly lagging behind the mainstream version.

When integrating our Practicum monitoring mod-

ule into the campus-wide Moodle system at our uni-

versity, which is based on a 1.9 version of the plat-

form, we found some shortcomings that could not

be solved with the speciﬁc settings of that installa-

tion. Among other problems, we could not collect the

results of a set of surveys into a single spreadsheet

for easier review, it was not possible to automatically

generate a ﬁnal report from selected parts of the pe-

riodic reports, we could not have the comments from

both tutors, academic and external, in separate sec-

tions of the report, the user associated with the exter-

nal tutor could not be enrolled in the course with the

access rights that we required, and the roles could not

be deﬁned more accurately to better suit our needs.

Therefore, we ended up with two versions of our

module: one that met our requirements but was in-

stalled in a separate platform, and another that was in-

tegrated into the corporate Moodle system but lacked

some of its intended functionality. The inability to in-

tegrate our module into the platform used in the uni-

versity defeated our initial goal of working with the

Practicum in the same way as with any other course.

4.2 The Google Docs Alternative

Given the difﬁculties explained above, we sought an

alternative design based on an emerging technology,

generally termed “the Cloud”, which is more and

more extended in these days, and we focused on a

speciﬁc implementation such as Google Docs.

ASSURINGTHEQUALITYOFTHEPRACTICUMINTHEEHEAWITHMOODLEANDGOOGLEDOCS-Design

ofaToolforFacilitatingthePracticumMonitoring

177

The key point that enables the use of this technol-

ogy is that we can reformulate the Practicum monitor-

ing process as a collaborative document editing pro-

cess. This may hold true for any course monitoring,

but in the case of the Practicum there is a peculiarity

due to the involvement of three different actors: the

student, the external tutor and the academic tutor.

Indeed, the monitoring can be regarded as the

preparation of a series of reports, both in an

asynchronous and a synchronous fashion. Asyn-

chronously, part of the documentation is elaborated

by the student, another part is written by the tutors

separately, and another part consists of comments

added by the tutors. When working synchronously, in

the equivalent of a face to face monitoring interview,

the participants can interact in real time, whether the

student with a tutor, or one tutor with the other.

Using a tool like Google Docs, we can beneﬁt

from the advantages of cloud computing and, most

important, we can solve the problems we faced when

integrating our module into the old-versioned Moodle

system of our university. Some of the beneﬁts of

using Google Docs include ﬁle format transparency,

ﬂexible access control, real-time concurrent editing,

ubiquitous access, reliability, revision history, and in-

tegration with spreadsheets.

By using these features, we can overcome the

problems due to an outdated version of Moodle, de-

scribed in subsection 4.1. For example, surveys can

be redeﬁned as spreadsheets and exported to a single

ﬁle to facilitate the tutors’ review tasks, a ﬁnal report

can now be generated automatically from the parts of

the periodic reports marked to this end, the comments

made by each tutor to the reports can be clearly dis-

tinguished, and the problems with role assignments

within Moodle are solved with the access rights and

document sharing functionalities of Google Docs.

Starting with version 2.1 of Moodle, a plugin

called Moodle-Google is available for integrating

Google Docs, and in general various applications

from the Google Apps suite, into a Moodle course

(Moodle, 2011). This plugin has been backported and

adapted to Moodle 2.0 as well. It allows access to a

Google Apps account from Moodle, and the use of the

Google applications available to that account.

The main problem we had when working with the

university institutional Moodle is that it is a pre-2.0

version of the platform, in which installation of the

Moodle-Google plugin is rather complicated. Thus,

instead of using that plugin we simply work with web

links pointing to the Google Docs documents created

for editing the assessment reports.

Although this solution is not as seamlessly inte-

grated into Moodle as it would be with the Moodle-

Google plugin, it fulﬁls the initial requirements de-

ﬁned for the Practicum monitoring process and works

reasonably well with any version of Moodle.

5 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper we have presented an implementation of

a Practicum monitoring system based on well-known

technological solutions such as Moodle and Google

Docs, with a view to accommodating the large num-

ber of students that will likely be enrolled in the

Practicum due to the deployment of the EHEA.

We have described the features of the Practicum at

UPF that make it require a speciﬁc tool, but it can be

generalisable to other tutored practice systems.

Some difﬁculties arose when our tool was to be in-

tegrated into the campus-wide Moodle system at UPF.

The problems came from the rigidness of this system,

which provides for the management of courses in all

majors, and thus incorporates many adaptations to the

local teaching system. It is therefore not easy to up-

date when new versions of Moodle are released, and

we found that the version currently used at our uni-

versity is too old for the module we implemented.

For this reason we have developed an alternative

solution based on Google Docs. We have shown how

the problems derived from the use of an old version

of Moodle can be overcome with Google Docs, based

on the cloud computing technology. And although the

access to the Google Docs documents is not as fully

integrated into old versions of Moodle as it can be

with newer versions, it nevertheless meets satisfacto-

rily the goals we had established for the assessment of

the Practicum of a large number of students, without

degrading the quality of the monitoring.

REFERENCES

Alemany, J., Perramon, X., and Panad`es, L. (2012). The

Practicum after EHEA. A case study. Submitted to

7th International Congress on University Teaching

and Innovation (CIDUI 2012).

EHEA (2010). European Higher Education Area of-

ﬁcial website. Retrieved Feb. 13, 2012, from

http://www.ehea.info/.

Jaques, D., Gibbs, G., and Rust, C. (1993). Designing and

Evaluating Courses. Educational Methods Unit, Ox-

ford Brookes University, Oxford.

Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning. Prentice Hall

Inc., New Jersey.

Moodle (2011). Google Apps integration – MoodleDocs.

Retrieved Feb. 13, 2012, from http://docs.moodle.org/

21/en/Google Apps Integration.

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