Development of a Moodle Extension for Improving the Management of the Educational Process

The management of distance education activities in the Politehnica University of Timisoara have different aspects and requires several development instances. Recently, the online development included also tools needed for human resources management and time management. Politehnica University of Timisoara uses, since 2009, the university Virtual Campus CVUPT, a Moodle based development. As many of Moodle instances are used in distance education settings, where activities happen also face-to-face in university labs, any off-platform relevant activities need to be reported and quantified manually. This is especially important in our university educational setting, where reported activity affects many teaching/learning indicators, including the academic staff' time reports. In order to properly mitigate this situation, we have developed a tool allowing Moodle integration with the official reporting procedure used by the academic staff from the distance education courses in our University. In this paper, we present the new methodology, the development process as well as the initial evaluation, by comparing the process of obtaining results from offline, previous form-based reports submitted in the past, with those obtained using the online tool in CVUPT. The evaluation run by the eLearning Center team revealed important feedback on time management, that will generate more change, many updates and other adaptations of the reporting tool in CVUPT. We can conclude that, for its first iteration, the online reporting tool was seen as a positive development, conducted to better time management of the distance education academic staff. Several proposed improvements are already in plan for the second development.