learning - Academic Conferences Limited

Jana Dlouhá et al.
course was distant (fully eLearning) and the planned workload was 150 hours (5 credits). Twelve
students of the 15 who enrolled successfully completed it.
2.1 Educational goals
In the course, students had to develop three literacies – environmental & SD, academic writing, and
ICT literacy. Environmental & SD literacy was related to the theme of the course and students had to
learn about environmental problems and sustainable development policies very generally, and study a
theme of their choice in more depth. Writing literacy was considered to be an important metacognitive
skill necessary to carry out the writing assignment. Students should proceed through all the stages of
the academic writing process; their progress from one stage to the next was monitored. ICT literacy
was a prerequisite and also a byproduct of learning. Students’ written assignments as the main
product of the course were displayed in the students’ wiki space, and finally, the tutor compiled a
Globalization Handbook as a common virtual publication available for a future “generation” of students
as a starting point (Dlouhá, 2010). The rules and formal customs of research and academic writing
had to be followed while stressing a creative and critical approach.
A wiki environment as an open space for students’ creative work on the course themes was used:
they wrote their assignments, discussed their content (including a peer review) and shared their views
there (Dlouhá & Macháčková-Henderson, 2008; Dlouhá & Dlouhý, 2009). The role of the learning
environment was specific; it should stress interdisciplinary aspects of the learning process, and
support active learning approaches and solutions. These goals were achieved thanks to its more fluid
character which offered different ways of going through content, and provided an interactive character
and a three-dimensional structure (hyperlinks opening successive themes).
2.2 Rules and requirements
No online testing occurred (cheating is difficult to prevent in distant education). Students experienced
academic discourse and the principles of communication in a community of researchers: its
possibilities (freedom of choice of the research theme), rules (research ethics and norms of writing,
respect for the critical procedures of a peer review, formal requirements) and limitations (the necessity
to narrow the theme of interest and to proceed with discipline and efficiency towards justified
conclusions).
The relationship between the different processes could be tracked (peer review versus changes in the
article). Moreover, the learning processes could also be assessed – they were documented in the
Wiki environment (where the writing process was realized) in the page history. This option allowed a
comparison of subsequent versions of the article and was used to analyze the influence of a student’s
review on the quantity of the text (supposedly affecting its quality) – see Figure 1.
Figure 1: Comparison of student essays in the wiki environment before and after the peer review
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