Design and assessment of virtual learning environments

Resumen

The virtual education is an increasing reality in more and more educational fields. Among the tools offered by this form of teaching-learning, the forum meets the right characteristics to become a useful psychodidactic element in creating spaces for co-constructed knowledge. This paper presents the course "intercultural education in practice" where a series of forums were included and, secondly, an approach to the evaluation of these forums, in this case in response to quantitative measures related to the indicators of participation and indicators of monitoring.The ultimate aim of this approach is to show and to exemplify empirically how the co-constructive process that characterizes the virtual education (VE) is produced.Indeed, the forum allows putting processes of multiple virtual interactions into practice in a flexible way, paving the way for the construction of an educational area of enormous potential. But there still are not many researches dealing with educational experiences of this kind and its evaluation in a multidisciplinary way. Although the particularity of these experiences adds an important methodological difficulty, addressing the quantitative and qualitative assessment has to show the effectiveness and efficiency of educational virtual forums and provide lines of psychodidactic development about this tool.