STATISTICAL ANALYSIS AND ADVANTAGES OF THE USE OF MOODLE IN PUBLIC EDUCATION IN MADEIRA

ABSTRACT

The emergence of the Internet and then the evolution of the World Wide Web (WWW) came to encourage and demand change in society.
In Portugal, the first sign of change in technology in primary and secondary education was with the advent of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Thus there is a great need for equipping schools with computer equipment and investing in the training of teachers.

With the goals required by the Ministry of Education for ICT subject on the 8th year since the school year 2012/2013, as in the case of “Communication and collaboration networking”, referring to the use of a digital platform. Moodle is one of the options, considered one of the best by the Ministry of Education.
The Bologna process has imposed, at the level of Higher Education, major changes and new challenges in the process of teaching and learning. The need to transition from a passive model of teaching, seated in the acquisition of knowledge, to a model leaned on skills development, having thus the need to use digital platforms to facilitate these changes. Moodle is one of the options adopted on a large scale in Higher Education.

The intention of this project, to make a statistical study of the usability and advantages of using Moodle in teaching Public schools, on the island of Madeira . This study, depending on the resources available to schools and the University of Madeira, taking into account its use by teachers and the provision of relevant educational content and knowing what it´s impact is on their students. For this, we applied surveys, for statistical purposes, to a group of students from the 8th Year and university. Also a questionnaire was given to a group of Moodle administrators. There was also the use of documentary sources and contact enlightening electronic percentages relating to Moodle.

Concluding that there is a huge gap between the existing equipment in schools and at home the students to practice and the limited use Moodle for teachers. As the university level this problem is almost nonexistent. In pre-school, there was only one pilot school using Moodle, however, the results were not good.
One of the obstacles of not using Moodle in Schools by teachers, according to the opinion of the administrator surveyed, is due to lack of continued practice after training of this software.

KEYWORDS: Teaching- learning, Internet, Curricular Goals, Moodle, ICT.