Educational technology

Moodle UCL

For many years now, Louvain professors have been using digital technology to enrich learning activities and supports they offer to their students. The Moodle UCL online learning platform is now used in most of the courses to offer additional elements to the course sessions: drill exercises, self-assessments, formative evaluations, questions and answers via discussion forums, complementary learning supports...

Here are other examples of initiatives aiming at this same goal:

Video podcast

Podcasting allows students to re-listen to lectures thanks to videos. At Louvain in Brussels (Woluwé), several classrooms are equipped with an infrastructure allowing this recording almost automatically. In addition, professors can get financial resources to develop themselves or make develop videos for educational purposes. These can be broadcast via a specific podcast server and/or through the official YouTube channels of University of Louvain. The provision of new recording infrastructures and new developments of the podcast server are currently being planned.

Digital televoting

Digital televoting tools allow students to respond in real time to multiple-choice questions asked by the professor as well as to ask questions during the course. An immediate feedback system that energizes the course and promotes concentration of the students by capturing their attention. Learning is consolidated. The software available for the Louvain community is Wooclap.

Online assessment

The impact of formative evaluations on the quality of learning has been demonstrated. A digital approach facilitates the organization: no photocopying, handling of large piles of sheets, manual correction... For graded evaluations and exams, it is also necessary to be able to guarantee the verification of the student's identity and to create a secure environment during the exam. University of Louvain has chosen the open source Safe Exam Browser.

Support in detecting plagiarism

Students should learn to correctly cite their sources of information when writing academic papers. With the Internet, the temptation - or the reflex - of copying and pasting is important. Professors can rely on the Compilatio software, for which University of Louvain has acquired a license, to help identify the similarities coming from the Internet in the papers they assess.