Intelligent tutoring system for distance education

This study aims to develop and implement a tool called intelligent tutoring system in an online course to help a formative evaluation in order to improve student learning. According to Bloom et al. (1971,117) formative evaluation is a systematic evaluation to improve the process of teaching and learning. The intelligent tutoring system may provide a timely and high quality feedback that not only informs the correctness of the solution to the problem, but also informs students about the accuracy of the response relative to their current knowledge about the solution. Constructive and supportive feedback should be given to students to reveal the right and wrong answers immediately after taking the test. Feedback about the right answers is a form to reinforce positive behaviors. Identifying possible errors and relating them to the instructional material may help student to strengthen the content under consideration. The remedial suggestion should be given in each answer with detaileddescription with regards the materials and instructional procedures before taking next step. The main idea is to inform students about what they have learned and what they still have to learn. The open-source LMS called Moodle was extended to accomplish the formative evaluation, high-quality feedback, and the communal knowledge presented here with a short online financial math course that is being offered at a large University in Brazil. The preliminary results shows that the intelligent tutoring system using high quality feedback helped students to improve their knowledge about the solution to the problems based on the errors of their past cohorts. The results and suggestion for future work are presented and discussed.

Úlcera venosa e terapia compressiva para enfermeiros: desenvolvimento de curso online

OBJETIVO: Descrever a elaboração de um curso on-line sobre úlcera venosa, com enfoque em terapia compressiva, para capacitação de enfermeiros. MÉTODOS: O desenvolvimento do curso on-line seguiu as fases de análise, design, desenvolvimento, implementação e avaliação, baseadas no design instrucional contextualizado. RESULTADOS: O curso dividiu-se em dez módulos estruturados no ambiente virtual de aprendizagem Moodle. Caracterizou-se por uma proposta construtivista, visando ampliar a participação do aluno, disponibilizar as principais referências, revisões e consensos, bem como utilizar objetos multimídia e recursos didáticos interativos. CONCLUSÃO: O curso possibilita a capacitação profissional do enfermeiro em terapia compressiva de maneira inovadora, flexível, interativa em diversos ambientes de cuidado.

Contribution of graduate programs in plant breeding to the education of plant breeders in Brazil

The success of agribusiness in Brazil in recent decades is unquestionable. Although the country has always had favorable conditions for agriculture (land, water and climate), this success has only come about recently, due to scientific research, which has resulted in considerable increases in yield and in improvement of product quality, as well as making the occupation of new agricultural frontiers possible. A decisive factor for development of agriculture in the country was the creation of EMBRAPA in 1973, which, in a few years, led to considerable demand for researchers with training in graduate programs. Among them are plant breeders, who came to exercise their activity throughout the country and in all ecosystems. The training of plant breeders was only possible because, as from the middle of the 1960s, the country began a wide-ranging education program, with the creation of several graduate programs in genetics and plant breeding.