Supporting teachers in higher education for didactic use of the learning environment moodle

Technology is becoming an important element of the pedagogical pro-cess at all levels of education. Regardless of its prevalence, many teach-ers are not able to take advantage of all the opportunities offered bytechnology. Knowledge of functionalities available in online learningenvironments and of their proper didactic use is vital for the launchto the pedagogical process. Within the project "Digital UL - WithInnovative Use of ICT to Excellence", we launched two online courses,where university teachers and colleagues became acquainted with thepossibilities, activities, and plug-ins that are part of the learning en-vironment Moodle, which is the most widely adopted tool for sharinglearning materials with the support for collaboration. The first on-line course was intended for participants with little or no experienceswith the use of Moodle, and the other for participants who alreadyhad some experience with this online environment and wanted to learnabout advanced activities in Moodle. The paper presents findings ofthe research after the completion of the online course. In the researchwe analyzed the use of Moodle in the pedagogical process among thehigher education teachers and colleagues of the University of Ljubljana.We obtained the results with a questionnaire and an analysis of the re-ports of updated study activities with Moodle that the participantscreated at the end of the courses. We were interested if the contentin the online course was meaningfully prepared and what kind of con-tribution they had for participants’ professional development. We alsoasked the participants if content fulfilled their expectations regardingthe objectives of the course and if they were enabled to gain new ex-perience, ideas, and knowledge about using Moodle in the pedagogicalprocess. The results showed that through the course, higher educationteachers found numerous opportunities for working in an online class-room, which they had not been familiar with before. Also, receivedfeedback has shown that participants support the online way of con-ducting training because they can adjust their time and pace accordingto their pedagogical obligations. In the future, we will repeat a seriesof courses and improve future performance with feedbac