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New Technologies for New Ambitions

In the academic year 2003-2004, the Universitat Jaume I showed its support for technology enhanced teaching by acquiring licences for a new environment, WebCT, which was specially created for giving distance learning courses. WebCT, which was originally developed by the University of British Columbia, includes tools for the design and development of interactive teaching material. Since it was developed ad hoc for educational settings, its capabilities have been conceived from this perspective and simulate the classical environment together with the classical hierarchical relationships between teacher and pupil. On the other hand, it includes a number of very useful applications that solve many of the problems we faced when using BSCW. It is, for example, visually attractive and navigation is very intuitive. Some of the activities that are possible in this environment are the following:

Evaluation Tools:

• Creation of self-evaluation questionnaires: it is possible to define a database with questions and answers and use them to make different questionnaires.
  
• Tasks can be defined with fixed or flexible hand-in dates; students give in their work in the same space where the task is defined and they can then see the correction and grade given by the teacher.
  
• Ongoing assessment. Students have access to a record for the academic year where they can check the progress they have made by looking up the grades they have been given for all the work completed throughout the year.
  
• Monitoring students. There is a wide range of instruments available for tracking students' progress, from checking the pages consulted by each user to the number of visits received by each section of the course and the time spent there, as well as finding out whether it has been a long time since a student last accessed the environment.
  

Communication Tools: Within the environment itself, users can access three different types of support:

• Chat: a program enabling communication in real time allows interaction between all the users of the environment, between members of the class group or those in the work group, depending on the settings used by the teacher.
  
• Forum: a space where messages about open matters or topics set by the teacher can be exchanged asynchronously; the application includes selection and filtering features.
  
• Email: all the users have an account which can only receive messages from other WebCT users and which is only accessible from this environment; the address book includes all the members of the class group.

Access to Material: Materials can be presented in all formats, although the simplest to visualise are HTML and PDF. The others have to be downloaded prior to opening them as in the case of BSCW. These materials are available in folders that are:

• shared by all the students, where the teacher leaves common materials,
• shared by the work groups, where they can create their own work, or
  
• available to individual students, who can create and administer personal pages.

Programming: It also includes tools for programming activities. More specifically:

• Agenda: there is a calendar that all the members can modify and where it is possible to keep track of classes, include personal and public appointments, and so on.
  
• Notices: the teacher can create notices that appear when students log onto the cyberspace.

Processing the materials is a very simple task and there are also online support materials. One particularly attractive feature in this sense allows you to programme the dates on which certain materials will appear right at the beginning of the year. This makes it possible to control students' progress or to let them know about the work to be done throughout the course. There are different tools for creating the different types of materials that we might want to use. There is, for example, a specific feature for creating the syllabus that includes fields for the most common materials and allows for different levels of detail in the explanation of the contents. Students therefore have access to detailed explanations of each unit (called lessons). Another feature is designed to create and organise the course materials the teacher wants to make permanently available to students, such as study notes, presentations, a list of objectives assigned to tasks or units, reference materials, glossaries, etc. Data migration is also very simple and we have not had any technological hitches with it. The same can be said of making backups, uploading and downloading files or generally administering the environment.

Nevertheless, we must also point out its negative aspects, such as its more traditional class conception, which was avoided by tools like BSCW, and the hierarchy that is established between teacher and pupil (which does not stop us from carrying out the same cooperative tasks as those that were previously done with BSCW - with less ease and comfort, though). Nevertheless, it is a tool that does greatly simplify the creation and development of technology enhanced classes.

However, in the course we used other methods, and so teletraining was combined with face-to-face sessions in conventional classrooms and in a translation laboratory, asynchronous tutorials with forums, chats and email, as well as face-to-face tutorials about the contents of the academic subject and the technology we use (computer-aided translation tools). In teletraining, WebCT was combined with the Legal Translator's Website as a documentary instrument and as an access point to the virtual community of legal translators.

All in all, this was a very useful tool in that it was easy to use for both trainees and the trainer. However, it was not practical for cooperative tasks, since the forum was the only place where students may upload files accessible to the whole class and it did not allow them to create folders and organize materials. Moreover, our university cancelled its subscription in the following year and we had to move to a free open-source online learning solution - Moodle.

Never-Ending Changes, and Never-Ending Opportunities

The latest phase of this project has been to adapt the methodology to a new e learning tool with different possibilities. Moodle is a free open-source application, which means that, obviously, anyone can afford it and that each institution can modify whatever they consider necessary to adapt it to its particular needs. Moreover, there is a virtual community of developers who share and make new tools to enhance this virtual environment available to everyone using Moodle, so that limitations can be shared and gradually solved. As said, this is the latest phase of the project and we will have to wait some time before we can really stand back and see the results from a little further away. However, we can already comment on some issues which should be improved if this is going to be a useful tool for translation trainers and trainees, as well as other issues which contribute to a positive evaluation of the tool.

First of all, the environment offers a pleasant appearance and several built-in applications which the teacher may add to any one section. The following figure is an example of a self-assessment exercise where the student first reads on different translation techniques and has different examples from legal translations. Then s/he must decide on the translation technique given to one particular example. After giving the right answer to this question s/he will be led to others from this same module on translation theory applied to legal translation practice. The students must complete the whole exercise and then they will get their marks immediately. (The exercise has been translated into English and shortened.)

Fig. 2. Sample self-assessment translation exercise

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