Session S3J 1-4244-0257-3/06/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE October 28 – 31, 2006, San Diego, CA 36 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference S3J-11 E-Docent: A Tool For The Creation Of Teaching Environments With Support For Educator Coordination Iván Álvarez 1 , José Rafael García-Bermejo 2 , Francisco J. García 3 1 Iván Álvarez, Computer Science Department, University of Salamanca, Spain, inavia@usal.es 2 José Rafael García-Bermejo, Computer Science Department, University of Salamanca, Spain, coti@usal.es 3 Francisco J. García, Computer Science Department, University of Salamanca, Spain, fgarcia@usal.es Abstract – The following paper describes e-docent, a web- based application for the construction of teaching sites. E- docent is an LMS (Learning Management System). In the same vein as other similar applications, it offers various ways to ease the communication between teachers and students, and also between students, thus trying to enhance the learning experience. However, its main trait is a coordination module. This is a tool for the team of educators who are responsible for a given discipline or set of subjects. It offers support to establish a set of relationships between subjects, thus facilitating a higher degree of cohesion among related matters. This means a shift in perception for the student since he or she is provided (in an automatic and explicit way) with a set of relationships between concrete aspects of various related subjects. Students are shown a holistic view of their studies, beyond the usual teaching materials. Educators can use an automatic search system to help them find points of interest in their own material, thus selecting the most significant. Documents (PDF, DOC, PPT) supplied to the portal by the educator are supplemented with a “learning object” which contains a set of metadata that describe document contents and point to other related documents. Index Terms - Virtual environments; Web-based education; Computer Science teaching; Collaborative environments; Coordination patterns. INTRODUCTION Teaching-related institutions have seen a remarkable increase in the use of tools for the creation of education-support web sites. This includes both presential and non-presential teaching of course; a virtual campus has become of the essence. However, many educators limit their use of these sites to posting mostly static web pages, as well as various kinds of documents. This information includes lecture timetables, slides, bibliography, related links etc. Other educators go one step further and create sites in students may submit tasks, discuss between themselves in a forum, and even consult the educator. This is where LMS (Learning Management Systems) are used. Many of these solutions are open software, like Claroline (see http://www.claroline.net/) or Moodle (see http://moodle.org/). By adding modules, the applications allow the user to easily create a whole teaching model. New technologies can be integrated in the teaching model in a natural way. e-docent belong to this set of tools. Disciplines taught within a given curriculum usually consist of various matters, which are taught by different educators. This situation can lead to an apparent lack of inter- matter coordination, although educators are perfectly conscious of their interdependence. Thus, students lack a holistic view of their studies, and this makes them less motivated and hence prone to failure. The tools we have mentioned do not offer modules with an adequate support for this problem. For this reason, the Departamento de Informática y Automática de la Universidad de Salamanca, more precisely within the Ingeniería Técnica en Informática de Sistemas studies, conceived the development of a tool that might address this lack. Thus was created e-docent, a tool for the creation of teaching sites that goes a step beyond the standard modules found in other tools. Our tool supports educator coordination for the matters that belong to a given discipline or knowledge area. From the educator’s point of view, e-docent lets the user add descriptive metadata [3] to the material that is supplied for students. Through these metadata, the educator is able to establish relationships between particular aspects of his or her subject and other subjects that have been submitted to the web site. This goal is achieved by means of an automatic indexing and searching mechanism. When the educator adds a new document to the web site, the system will index it with no user intervention. Then the user can submit a set of terms that he or she thinks to be of special interest about that particular document. Then the system shows the user a list of documents that contain those terms; these documents may belong to his own set, or perhaps they may belong to other subjects within the site. Then the educator can set links between terms belonging to various documents that he or she considers being most significant. These links are also added as metadata for further reference. From the student’s point of view, when he or she accesses a document within the site (let’s say a PDF, PPT or DOC file), e-docent will look for any metadata associated to that document. If any are found, they will be shown as links to