Colloque international Wims 2007 - Tania Bartalini

Tania Bartalini (Università degli Studi di Firenze) :

We will describe our first experience using wims in teaching Differential Calculus at the first year of Computer Science Degree Course at the University of Florence. We decided to adopt wims following some considerations. First of all, we noted that students come up against many difficulties in calculus during their first year of study. Furthermore, the number of students attending the course is very large and there is only one teacher who have to teach and to assess all them ; that means that the teacher's workload is very heavy. We think that wims could help teachers, to assess faster students, and students, to train with mathematical exercises and to self-evaluate. This was the first time that an e-learning tool such wims has used in this Computer Science courses and it has been necessary to overcome some people's worries and mistrusts.
his experience help us to verify the capability of wims and to focus on main difficulties, that are mainly due to the Italian organization of courses and to our lack of experience with wims. The former avoid the teacher to meet regularly students in laboratory : that requires students to be independent and autonomous in using wims ; the latter is related to the absence of a Community of Practice around wims that makes harder to introduce such tool to students and to teachers.