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The overall structure may be varied according to course needs, and so it may look like a forum, where leading topics dealt with by all participants would structure all contents, or else it may be divided into weeks or into topics. I particularly use the three of them in different subjects. The forum best suits a final course where the students have to develop a complete translation project involving more complex translation and some research competence with no face-to-face classes. This environment is thus used as a virtual customer-translator meeting point, where questions, answers, documents and resources may be exchanged, and advice given to all would-be translators. In another course, materials are structured according to topics - all related to company law - so that the students can specialise in one of them and work with it from the start. These students will be responsible for shedding light on issues arising from their assigned specialty when we work with the translation of the different texts included in the syllabus. Finally, the first of the legal translation courses in the degree is structured around a (fairly tight) time schedule and materials are presented in the same week they are going to be worked on in class, so that students know what they have (or had) to do every week. This, together with notices on upcoming events, allows students to follow the learning process with a high degree of certainty as to what they are expected to do, which helps to minimise the typical rejection with which they face this subject in this first year.

Other positive features of this environment are the 'recent activity' and the 'online users' sections, whereby, on logging on, both trainer and trainees may know what has been changed since they last entered the virtual classroom and who is working at the same time, wherever they may be. Assignments, quizzes, glossaries, self-correcting exercises, chats, forums, as well as files and links are some of the resources and activities which may be used in this environment. A very special type of activity is what is known as a 'wiki', a traditional webpage that can be modified and updated by anyone in the system. However, participants cannot upload files, so everything must be converted to txt, rtf or HTML formats, which precludes easy management of translation memories and terminology databases.

Fig. 3 Moodle environment for a legal translation course
in the Universitat Jaume I

All in all, Moodle shares common ground with WebCT in that it is designed for a hierarchical learning process, and thus the possibilities to enhance cooperation values among the group are diminished. This is something which definitely needs changing, and from the Department of Translation and Communication we have asked the University to allow for a wider range of possibilities for cooperative tasks. Thus, we hope we will be able to maintain diversity in the development and management of course contents and students' results - something which we were not able to do with the cooperative work environment - while at the same time avoiding the need to sacrifice a value we consider essential for the success of the translation and interpreting community in our country. We are closer than ever to a virtual campus for legal translation training, but obviously there are still many things that need considering.

Progressions and Regressions

The responses to the questionnaires administered to the users of the different environments have enabled me to record the experiences they have undergone with each of the technology enhanced teaching models described here. Below, I will comment on them.

Fig. 4 Students' evaluation of the environment used (range 1-5)

Before going on, it should be pointed out that the students' literacy in technology was expected to increase gradually over the years, but this did not happen; they are not more used to computers, the Internet and well-known tools such as chats. This may, at least partially, account for the fact that the year when seminars on technology were introduced (with WWW used together with BSCW and a greater emphasis on supervision), seems to score higher in students' acceptance. On the other hand, WebCT and Moodle were rated lower than a simple WWW environment, despite their offering increased ease-of-use for the trainer, and the fact that interactivity and autonomy were clearly fostered to a lesser extent with WWW and BSCW had several additional technological problems. Overall, 86.5% stated that working with online resources is practical as opposed to the remaining 13.5%, who did not find it such a handy way of working mainly due to the shortage of connections, especially at home.

As regards user-friendliness, in general terms most students found these tools easy to use but there were very significant differences from one environment to another. Thus, while 100% of the students thought WebCT is easy to use, 50% believed that BSCW is hard to learn at first even with the aid of support classes. This was brought out by the fact that in the second year of using BSCW 25% still thought that it is a difficult tool to learn to handle. Moodle is also hard to work with at first, and 50% of students who had been working with this environment expressed this opinion. In contrast, 100% of cases perceived the website as being easy to handle and the comments made by technologically less literate students showed their enthusiasm for it. This enthusiastic response was also the case with regard to WebCT, but not so often.

Fig. 5. Overall ease-of-use of the virtual environments

Turning to the influence on attitudinal aspects, the environment raised students' motivation in 57% of cases and of those who did not find it increased it (35% of cases), 96% claimed they already found themselves motivated to study the subject due to other factors, and that this was not affected (the other 4% did not answer). In consequence, the main aim of the project remained intact. Overall, we found that, for one reason or another, the evaluation of students' interest towards the course was positive in 96.7% of cases. Nevertheless, we should highlight the drop in the percentages obtained with the use of BSCW without face-to-face tutorials, where the percentage of people who became more interested in the subject because of the environment fell to 25%. Even more worrying is the fact that Moodle decreased interest in 4% of cases, and only increased interest in 40% of that year's students.

Fig. 6 Influence of the environment on students' interest in the subject,
as perceived by the students themselves

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