Virtual Laboratory
In this environment the students can carry on online practice work and also true exercises in virtual laboratories that are linked to some specific subjects, as physics for instance.
Online Practice Work
In this section online interactive practice work is included. Their implementation allows the video professors to link the theoretical aspects treated in the video lessons to the practical aspects illustrated of the issues treated by the same video-lessons by carrying on exercises, solving problems, preparing papers or real-time simulations. The Tutors too produce web-based exercises and can customise their training work. The student, once he/she completes his/her exercises, can submit them directly to the tutor and make them be corrected and receive the relative assessment.
Virtual Laboratory
The UTIU would like to further develop the inclusion of virtual laboratories, however their high costs of realisation do not allow for implementing new ones. At present we dispose of physics and electrotechnics laboratories; we hope to develop new laboratories for other disciplines; virtual laboratories really allow for developing new learning models that will tend to shift human cognitive doing at all levels: from the re-constructional-symbolic mode to that of the motor-perception one and, furthermore, it opens up fields of knowledge to the motor-perceptive mode that were before only accessible to the re-constructional-symbolic one.
Thanks to virtual laboratories it is possible to overcome several limits. In the first place, that one of materiality: modify any object in digital way, offering countless options and possibility to practise; possibility of learning, put virtually into practice what has been learnt, test new techniques before putting them into practice.
Through telematic networks the same virtual environment can be simultaneously shared by several users (teachers and pupils, guides and viewers). The concept of space, as a physical entity, also no longer applies, and it is possible to display the subject under study in any time and at any place.
The Virtual Laboratory of the International Telematic University UNINETTUO appears as a true environment where the student will be able to put into practice the abstract principles learned during the theory lessons, activating a learning process of the “learning by doing ” type.
In this respect, the Virtual Laboratory of the International Telematic University UNINETTUNO is an integral part of the lesson since it makes possible to immediately link with the direct experimentation of what is illustrate by the professor whenever the student wishes so.
Also the exercises put at the students’ disposal have been included into the Cyberspace in order to make the completed by the students and submitted to the tutor to be evaluated; so doing the student is constantly supported and guided in the analysis of the procedures carried on and of the mistakes done and by the feedback of the intelligent system and/or telematic tutor.
The goal is to create a powerful synergy in the virtual laboratory so that theoretical learning and practical problem-solving co-exist in the correct ratio and fully integrate each other: the student will be able to think about his experiences in the learning environment, and the abstract principles described by the teacher become motivated, are made operative and can be committed to memory thanks to the problem-solving activities.