www.profetic.org/revue Context

Les auteurs decrivent la conception et l'utilisation d'e-tivites, mot forge pour designer des activites menees dans le cadre d'un cours a distance appele « Politique nationale et internationale dans l'enseignement ouvert et a distance », lui-meme inclus dans un diplome de maitrise intitule « Technologie de l'Information en Enseignement a Distance ». L'article se concentre sur la triple concordance entre les objectifs, les methodes et le systeme d'evaluation, et sur la representation de cette triple concordance.


Analysis of the existing resources
The new Master Degree program "Information Technology in Distance Learning" was initialised only in 2002 (Matickas, 2002

Analysis of constraints and opportunities
Since the course "National and International -Face-to-Face consultations and lecturing (an initial meeting plus two additional meetings for consultation and interim reporting on work in progress).

Conception (Objectives-Methods-Evaluation)
We specified the course objectives, defined the students activities (including the 2 "e-tivities"), the course material and finally the evaluation strategy.

Objectives of the course and of the e-tivities
Course objectives were analysed according to Leclercq's (1997, p. 72) "Architecture of Long terms Competencies". We attributed five specific (content-bound) objectives to the course.
We also decided that the course should help our students acquire the transversal (non-specific to a domain) competencies such as the abilities to learn on their own, i.e. to become autonomous learners (Rowntree, 1996), to continue to study after the course (lifelong learning) and to apply efficiently their previous experience (Parker, 2004, pp. 385-388). For the purpose of contributing to the acquisition of those long term and general competencies, we operationalized them into more practical, limited and proximal objectives in three "transversal" categories: instrumental, self-knowing and motivational (involvement) objectives (Leclercq, 1999;Leclercq & Poumay, 2005).
The Table 1 presents the set of objectives for the course and those that will be the focus of the two e-tivities (far right column).
The two e-tivities developed for the course aim to address 8 out of the 9 learner's objectives identified.

Pedagogical methods of our 2 e-tivities
Student's actions can be described in terms (in bold letters hereafter) of Leclercq and Poumay's (2005)

Triple consistency
The concept of triple consistency has been stressed by Tyler (1949), who argues that there is a need for consistency between objectives, methods and evaluation. They are presented hereafter, in a table that helps to make clear the relations between (column 1) the learning methods, (column 2) the objectives of the e-tivity and (column 3) the evaluation methods.
The Table 2  Objectives is also based on theoretical rationale (construct validity again) and will also be permanently a point of discussion... and improvement.

Several Methods (activities) can contribute to the attainment (potentially mastery) of a given
Objective (if the consistency hypothesis is fulfilled).   This, again, is hypothetical and needs to be confirmed (or infirmed) by further research.

Type of competencies
6. In the e-tivities, there is a variety of Learning Events (Leclercq & Poumay, 2005). For instance, in e-tivity 1, observation, reception, exploration and practice have taken place, and in e-tivity 2, there was creation, debate and metacognition.
Only experimentation (problem solving) has not. The "variety principle" is also of hypothetical nature since Leclercq & Poumay (2005) suggest it is the best formula to impact a combination of objectives (from the most motivational to the most cognitive ones). This also has to be repeatedly confronted to experience.

WebCT
The professor of this course had experience using WebCT and consequently had the skills to manage this environment without any assistance.
She also used Hot Potatoes software, which offers various types of evaluation tools, for other e-tivities (e.g. interactive crosswords).

Course design
The

Conclusion
It was a challenge for the professor to develop animation and evaluation methods for the course objectives she defined. The difficulty lay in the fact that once the different methods were decided, the Tutor (here the professor herself) had to manage these e-tivities, what Leclercq (1998, p. 104) calls "didactical polyvalence". For instance, s/he should be an e-moderator in rolewww.profetic.org/revue playing, an instructor and an evaluator of reports content. The professor discovered that even a potentially "boring" subject as "Policy in ODL" could be experienced by students in an attractive way and that students are able to build their competencies as autonomous learners.