Development and Practical Use of e-Learning to Support Students During Fieldwork in the Local Community

Abstract

Our research question is whether we can nurture students’ self-efficacy and problem finding and solving skills with the least interference from teachers, with a help of the ICT in PBL and fieldwork as the university classes. In the previous research, we found a desirable PBL should be a one which has least teachers’ interference, such as providing goals or leading the discussion by the teachers. But in our PBL classes conducted in the previous year, we found no interference tends to lead students fail in the project. So, we developed a Learning Management System which contains the following three components; 1) Enabling students to make well-structured fieldwork plans by themselves. 2) Visualizing the procedure of the interaction between the students and field residents. 3) Visualizing the students’ moving on site. With this LMS we succeeded to reduce the number of project failure and increased good actions of the students.