Contribution of Virtual Classrooms to the Personal Learning Environments (PLE) of the students of the Career of Informatics Applied to Education of National University of Chimborazo

Abstract

[EN] The incorporation of Information Technology and Communication in education has ensured new learning environments, such as virtual classrooms present today in most Ecuadorian universities, both for distance education or online or to complement classroom education whose duality is known as B-Learning. This is the case of the National University of Chimborazo, Public Higher Education Institution of the Ecuador, which five years ago has begun to gradually integrate these new computing learning’s resources. The present study investigates the use of virtual classrooms as tools constitute student’s Personal Learning Environments (PLE) in the career of Informatics Applied to Education, where the involved students are studying in the annual mode National University Chimborazo Ecuador. The main results of the study we can mention that in the career in question, there is an increasing the number of subjects that support virtual classrooms for classroom teaching, but learning occurs both in and out of these new learning environments, thus, Web 2.0 tools are important in these processes either to access, process, publish and share resources and content. Finally, we believe that this study is the starting point for future research on the relevance, impact, effectiveness, etc. incorporating the VLE in addition to university teaching as well as on relations and possibilities of integration between LMS and PLEs and latest topics as mobile learning and mobile PLEs.