The paper considers the role of philosophy and philosophical disciplines as the means of forming general cultural competences, in particular, in the development of critical thinking. The article emphasizes that the process of forming over-subject and soft skills, which, as a rule, include also critical thinking, gets much more complicated under the conditions of the reduction in the volume of philosophical courses. The paper grounds that one of the ways to “return” philosophy to educational programmes can be the implementation of training, using the e-learning environment, especially Moodle. In addition, authors point to the expediency of using this system and, in general, e-learning as an instrument for collaborating students to the world's educational community and for developing their lifelong learning skills. The article specifies the features of providing electronic support in philosophy teaching, to which the following belongs: the difficulty of parametrizing the learning outcomes; plurality of approaches; communicative philosophy. The paper highlights the types of activities that can be implemented by tools of Moodle. The use of the following Moodle test tasks is considered as an example: test control in the flipped class, control of work with primary sources, control of self-study, test implementation of interim thematic control. The authors conclude that the Moodle system can be used as a tools of online support for the philosophy course, but it is impossible to transfer to the virtual space all the study of this discipline, because it has a significant worldview load. Forms of training, directly related to communication, are integral part of the methodology of teaching philosophy as philosophy itself is discursive, dialogical, communicative and pluralistic. Nevertheless, taking into account features of the discipline, it is possible to provide not only the evaluation function of the test control, but also to realize a number of educational functions: updating the basic knowledge, memorization, activating the cognitive interest, developing the ability to reason and the simpler ones but not less important, - the skill of getting information and familiarization with it.
Reforming of the education system should be provided for in response to public demand
and information standards of the world educational culture, which is focused on the
formation of key competences of participants in education [
The modern times are characterized by such peculiarities as the accelerated dynamics of socio-cultural development, the change of interpretative schemes of worldview, and broadening of information horizons. The processes mentioned above require understanding of the fact that Ukraine cannot collaborate with European countries as far as it concerns education and cannot expect for mutual evaluation of academic diplomas without the development philosophical disciplines as a methodological basis of critical thinking as mental attribute of key competences. For it is necessary to introduce e-learning tools in the educational process, the educators should take into consideration the specificity of their implementation that allow to master the strategy of teaching philosophy on the basis of the online learning environment. Thus, there is a need to outline the educational perspectives of philosophy teaching with the involvement of online learning environment and to identify the particularities of the use of test tools in this process. 1.2
The issue of the placing philosophical disciplines in the educational space is considered
by scholars all over the world. The research paradigm is represented by Alan Crawford
[6], John Dewey [7], Diane F. Halpern [
Standard educational programmes cannot achieve such progress in the development
of cognitive skills, as the programmes, including the development of critical thinking.
The author of an educational programme focused on reflective thinking Matthew
Limpan admits that teaching thinking skills is different from the ordinary acquisition
of academic knowledge. He substantiates the idea of higher order thinking, which
synthesizes creative, moral, ethical and critical thinking. Matthew Lipman considers
the ways of thinking as necessary modes of reflective educational practice [
The use of the potential of philosophy in the development of critical thinking and other important competences is complicated due to several reasons. Firstly, the place of philosophy in a number of general educational courses is uncertain. Secondly, it is complicated to transfer the content of philosophical disciplines to e-learning platforms.
The practical implementation of this project is based on one of the most promising
online learning platforms, which is actively implemented in the educational process and
facilitates its modernization – Moodle. In the current educational discourse, the
potential of using e-learning platforms is considered in various aspects [2]. Serhii V.
Petrenko [
Unfortunately, there is a dangerous tendency in the national education to curtail the humanities, especially philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, cultural studies, etc. They are losing their positions, undermined by the tendencies of educational instrumentalism and vital pragmatism. The reasons of such situation are as follows: the relativization of the educational culture, the lack of definition of standards of quality of education, as well as rigidity, the firm rootedness of the “monopolized” post-Soviet educational tradition. After a few decades, philosophical subjects focused on Marxism lost their relevance, as they reproduced the structures of crowd psychology, the realized ideological function and function of identity formation. As a result, philosophy focused on Marxism created a false stereotype about its uncertainty or even its uselessness. Thus, a hidden paradox has emerged: the minimization of the humanities in education contradicts current educational strategies, outlined in the Law on Education.
Among the educational competences defined by the Law on Education, there are a
number of extra-curricular competences, which, in our opinion, provide for an in-depth
mastery of a philosophical resource. According to the Law on Education, “common for
all competences are the following skills: reading with understanding, a skill to express
one’s opinion orally and in writing, critical and systemic thinking, ability to logically
justify one’s position, creativity, leadership, ability to manage emotions in a
constructive way, assess risks, make decisions, solve problems, ability to cooperate
with other people” [
Therefore, the main unsolved aspect of the problem is the question of whether the information, purified from philosophy, is sufficiently efficient in competitiveness of education if it is considered as a complex product, formed by long-term research selection by historical trial and error and as the result of successful, balanced, and projected educational programmes, focused on education and society, theory and practice. The implementation of electronic support in the teaching of philosophy is also important. However, the specific nature of philosophy as a subject should be taken into consideration. Using e-learning platforms is a definite challenge of the modern times, so the educators need to respond to it adequately. Nevertheless, the following question arises: how and to what extent can we trust e-learning, in training philosophy and other humanities?
Thus, the objective of the paper is to reveal the peculiarities of electronic support of teaching philosophy, highlighting its subject specificity on the basis of methodically substantiated forms of test control. 2
If philosophy is considered as a source of critical thinking, the method of its formation appears as a combination of different models of learning. It is clear that “rigid models” are typically suitable for individual tasks, while “soft models” dominate when there are atypical problematic situations with uncertainty potential. Such models play a special role in the process of personality formation. “The development of critical thinking is just such a task that can be solved with the help of a soft learning model,” says Serhii O. Terno [32, p. 18]. Methods of the critical thinking development require a set of conditions that include problematic situations, knowledge of critical thinking strategies, creating choice situations, making a dialogue, giving students’ opinions in writing, the right to correct mistakes, etc. This system of learning implies its openness, plasticity, the presence of variations and feedback. Individual-oriented project methods and dialogue play a special role, as they are focused on reconstructing the educational participants’ individual experience. The methodology is based on the following principles: identifying and denying assumptions, verifying accuracy of facts and logical consistency, examining context and exploring alternatives [32, p. 18]. In our opinion, this is the way in which the monologic “banking” or fixed teaching is reoriented to qualitatively developing innovative model.
Such a guideline was taken into account by the community of lecturers of the Philosophy Department in Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University in the process of teaching the course “Philosophy” with its positive consequences. Firstly, the philosophical resource was preserved as a source of formation of different types, styles of thinking, a methodological platform for learning the variety of the best examples of world philosophical culture. Secondly, the structure of the course, the logic of its presentation, demonstrated the effective implementation of a number of tasks of informative and constructive content, as it successfully combined the traditional informative or lecture-seminar system of education and the modern pedagogical approaches, which necessarily include person-oriented techniques.
Thus, there was a need to combine the critical resource of philosophy and the tools, provided by the e-learning environment. Obviously, such a combination could not have been a perfunctory transfer of the course to an online learning platform. However, it also requires both the peculiarities of the course and the specifics of the chosen platform. We used Moodle as such e-learning platform.
In our opinion, we should consider the particularities of using Moodle, taking into account the global challenges, tasks and problems that cause the reform of the education system in Ukraine. Moreover, it is necessary to pay attention to features of use of the platform in comparison with similar systems. Thirdly, it is necessary to demonstrate the expediency of appealing to Moodle, in the context of teaching the social sciences and humanities, especially philosophy.
As for the first aspect, we should admit that the implementation of Moodle is increasingly correlated with the prospect of implementing the principles of blended and distance learning, taking into account that the latter is a relatively new phenomenon in the educational space of Ukraine [5]. Serhii V. Petrenko says: “The use of modern information and communication, electronic technologies in combination with pedagogical experience will allow to raise higher education in Ukraine to a higher level” [23, p. 140]. This problem is also considered in the context of globalization, changes in the institutional status of the education system and the integration of the national education system into the European educational space [20, p. 116]. In response to these challenges, the scholars draw attention to the following benefits of distance learning: the ability to save considerable amount of time while displaying significant amounts of information; focusing on the specific achievements of each student; ensuring the relative independence of the process of communication between the student and the teacher from the place and time, organization of control and planning of students’ independent work in the conditions of reduction of class hours and transition to the credit-modular system, etc. [17, p. 102; 36, p. 34]. In general, these characteristics have economic, operational, informational and pedagogical dimensions [19, p. 98]. Unlike distance learning that requires using ICT, blended learning presupposes a combination of different forms of activities (traditional, distance, electronic, etc.), at the same time it takes advantage of distance learning and eliminates its disadvantages [23, p. 141]. An important tendency of recent years is the increasing level of integration of distance and traditional learning [3, p. 6].
As for the second aspect, we should mention that there are several groups of
elearning organization software: copyright software, learning management systems,
content management systems, and educational content management systems [24,
p. 105]. Among these tools, one of the most suitable for higher education institutions is
the open source distance learning platforms, to which the Moodle belongs (in general,
there are a great number of such systems: ATutor, Claroline, Dokeos, Sakai,
Prometheus, etc.) [24, p. 106]. A considerable number of scholars think that Moodle
has certain advantages over other similar systems. The evidence is the considerable
number of users who have chosen this system (about 90 million people [23, p. 140]),
as well as the fact that it is used by educational institutions in more than 100 countries
[24, p. 106], demonstrating positive statistics of students’ involvement [21, p. 428–
430]. The basis for the functioning of this system is based on the principles of social
constructivism, according to which, the teacher is regarded as an assistant and mentor;
training is carried out in activity; self-presentation and self-realization of students are
provided; the learning environment is flexible, able to adapt to specific needs; the
student can observe and respond to the activity of participants in the educational process
[
Other advantages include: openness of the system, ability to adapt to specific tasks and types of activities; providing ample opportunities for communication and data exchange; the availability of a flexible evaluation system and opportunities for statistical analysis of performance; versatility and simplicity in using [24, p. 106]. An important argument in favour of Moodle is that as an open source system, it can be freely distributed, applied and modified [23, p. 141].
Moodle is quite capable of providing the distance learning functions assigned to it, but it should be admitted that the use of a virtual learning environment has its peculiarities when it supports training courses in philosophical disciplines.
(1) The complication of parameterization of learning outcomes. This is due to the fact that all philosophical disciplines and, first of all, philosophy involve the teaching of thinking, and not just memorizing the biographies of a number of philosophers and difficult obscure terms. Obviously, this peculiarity is inherent in other courses, but the main difference is that the results of teaching philosophy are very difficult to calculate and quantify. This problem is typical, in general, for determining the level of competence formation, which does not reduce to specific knowledge, abilities and skills. We have discussed above the competences, which include, inter alia, environmental competence and information and communication competence, lifelong learning, civic and social competences related to the ideas of democracy, justice, equality, human rights, well-being and a healthy lifestyle, with an awareness of equal rights and opportunities; cultural competence. For this type of competence there is a problem of verification, parameterization, quantification, the solution of which would make it possible to simply revision of the level of their formation by tools of e-learning, where testing is particularly convenient and widespread.
(2) The plurality of approaches. The second problem is related to the specificity of philosophy, namely its pluralistic nature. Philosophy cannot be represented as a single holistic entity, the conventional result of a study of the existing philosophic community. Philosophy is a constant development of thought, which consists in asking questions, finding answers and constantly rethinking them. Thus, any reference or educational material in philosophy bears a significant imprint of the philosophical position of its author, which cannot be considered universally acceptable to all participants in philosophical discourse.
(3) Communicative nature of philosophy. There was an experiment when the android
Bina48 gave a lecture on philosophy [
For the use of e-learning courses is an up-to-date challenge that can greatly enhance students’ cognitive activity through interesting activities, the philosophy teacher must find ways to integrate these activities into the learning process and use them in a way that does not deteriorate, but rather improve the quality of philosophy teaching. Obviously, it is simply impossible to fully implement a philosophy course on an elearning platform without communicating with a teacher. It is not only about teacher’s support in forums, chats, ongoing consultations and other forms of feedback, but it is also about full-fledged group seminars, involving pluralism of thoughts, discussions, and critical, philosophic reasoning in real-time. 3
In teaching philosophy, not all activities are reduced to face-to-face communication. The student has to develop skills of individual work, be able to work with primary sources, to carry out relations and systematization, to draw conclusions, to reason the opinion and to express it and so on. Thus, in the process of philosophy teaching, it makes sense to use e-learning courses as a support of full-time study, which allows to cover other activities of the student and to evaluate his or her individual work. Let us consider some of the techniques of using a Moodle-based e-learning course and their peculiarities in philosophy teaching, using the Moodle controlling tools in the philosophy course.
Firstly, the thing that makes Moodle convenient is to provide theoretical material. This approach makes it possible to use the flipped classroom model when students are introduced to the lecture material before the lecture begins. Then, the lecture itself is based on explaining the most interesting points of the topic, discussing problematic and incomprehensible parts of the material (Fig. 1). It is advisable to combine the flipped classroom model with the simplest test to check whether the students have read the material to the lecture. Test tasks most often involve the literal reproduction of text and they perform two functions: checking for content understanding and activating memorization.
We should admit that the test assessment of the quality of the philosophy study is quite complicated and, when provided formally, it usually has a negative result. Firstly, ordinary tests are mainly focused on checking the memorization of certain characteristics, terms and names, which is quite possible without understanding the essence of the philosophical concept. Secondly, tests without any material, given in advance, provide students with a choice of a textbook or other reference sources. In the case of philosophy, it cannot be guaranteed that the opinion of the author of the test coincides with the way the relevant material is presented in the textbook chosen by the student. Thus, it is advisable to limit the use of simple verification tests as a control measure in the virtual accompaniment of philosophy training to the following parameters: (1) tests can only serve as a tool of the simplest control of familiarization with the material before the lecture; (2) tests should be directly bound to, and limited to, the material provided. It is necessary to mention some technical points. Moodle allows you to create various types of tests. For this purpose, it is quite convenient to use several test types: multiple choice tests, tasks with short answer, matching tasks, built-in answers, gap texts, true or false statements. The most problematic types of tasks are multiple choice tests and gap texts, where a student has to fill in the missing words. In Moodle multiple choice tests are implemented very well, if you do not take into account the following feature: if the student selects all the answers, he or she will be assessed as having chosen all the right answers. Therefore, while creating the test, it is advisable to use the penalty for incorrect answers, which is realized by negative indicators.
Missed word assignments or the gap texts differ from short answers in that regular “*” expressions to substitute any character sequence cannot be used. Missing words should be filled in, so there is a serious spelling problem. If we do not consider the cases of the students’ illiteracy or carelessness, we deal with the instability of Ukrainianspeaking philosophical terminology and the lack of a stable tradition of Ukrainian transliteration of the philosophers’ names. For example, “Leibniz” can be spelled in Ukrainian as ‘Лейбніц’ – ‘Лейбниц’ – ‘Лейбніць’ – ‘Ляйбниць’ – ‘Ляйбніц’ and etc. There are several ways out of the situation. For example, it is possible to provide students with accurate spelling, to familiarize them with the terms to be used in the tests, and to provide clear instructions for completing this type of assignment. 3.2
The skill to work with primary sources, analyze them and correlate with the theoretical material described in the textbook is an important type of students’ activity while studying philosophy. The primary sources are often discussed at the seminar, but this kind of work can be successfully implemented through the online support of the Moodle training course. In addition to widespread multiple-choice tasks and built-in answers, it is appropriate to use gap texts and true or false statements. Moreover, it is necessary to focus not on the literal reproduction of the text of the primary source, but on realizing the author’s opinion and on correlating it with the philosophical direction or tradition to which the author of the text belongs. The re-writing tasks showed good results in “true or false statements”, when the opinion presented in the source text is formulated in other words (Fig. 2). 3.3
The university course in philosophy provides much of the material that the student studies out of the classroom. It is necessary to state that making notes and writing assignments are irreversibly out-of-date, but this should not be considered as a negative trend. Rewriting and reproduction is rapidly inferior to speculating and evaluation, which should be reflected as a change in teaching methods, especially in philosophical courses that have a world-view forming task. Independent study in a philosophy course means that the student works on certain themes for which the student has been provided with the relevant list of references. However, no one can guarantee that the student will not use Google search engine as the primary source of answers instead of reading recommended textbooks and sources. In such situation, one can find some positive aspects, as independent work involves familiarity with fairly standard concepts, definitions and personalities. Thus, doing simple tests for choosing names, book titles, philosophical directions will not be superfluous, and it will allow the out-of-class study with the online learning environment should also include tasks that do not provide obvious answers that pop up in the first search engine rows. So, it is advisable to develop tasks that help the student to master the material submitted for self-study. It is appropriate give the student a task to analyze the text where the student is offered to choose a statement that most fully reflects the main idea of the text, or a statement that contradicts the text, a statement that may or may not a conclusion (Fig. 3). The specificity of test verification of out-of-class study is the need to set a deadline clearly. This is due to the fact that most of these tasks are woven into the canvas of the classroom material and their untimely fulfillment breaks the logic of teaching. On the other hand, the student should understand that out-of-class study is as chronologically regulated as activities in the classroom, which are carried out on schedule. The method of self-study is not regulated. It is focused on checking the results; thus the student develops skills of self-study, self-control and planning. 3.4
The possibility to make full use of test tasks for interim control is also limited. Firstly, it does not justify setting a high score for these types of control, so it stimulates some manifestations of students’ plagiarism, because it exists in a form of distance learning. Secondly, thematic control does not imply the availability of ready-made material, as in the case of preparation for an “flipped classroom” or an activity for checking understanding of primary sources. Thirdly, thematic control should be designed not only to check what students have memorized, but also to presuppose tasks that require speculation and reasoning. Thus, it is appropriate to use such tasks as matching, multiple choice tests, but with a slightly more complicated formulations. The challenges of finding a mismatch, finding an error, or finding the wrong answer are considered to be fruitful. The task of matching statements with authors has also shown good results as well as the tasks for chronological ordering. In addition to testing knowledge, the matching tasks also have a cognitive load: it is convenient to offer students a number of characteristics of philosophical directions or doctrines, which are usually opposed, in order to relate them to these areas (here it is appropriate to create the task in such a way that the characteristics are distributed evenly and not more than three parameters, optimally two). It is appropriate to offer students assignments for reasons that involve establishing a pattern, continuing a logical chain, choosing the causes or effects of a particular position.
We should draw attention to the task of drawing conclusions in which students are asked to select all the correct conclusions (or one) from the text proposed. In the simpler version, it is a reformulation of the thought, in a more complex one, the logical or substantive consequences generated by the idea demonstrated in the text. Test for matching is convenient to use as an extension of the test for true or false statements, because it allows you to evaluate a number of statements at once by correlating them with the choice of true/false (Fig. 4).
The result of thematic control in this form is not only the score expressed in points, but also a certain broadening of the student’s horizons. Obviously, in the development of in-class and out-of-class activities, the student does not focus on reading the works of the philosophers mentioned above, but focuses primarily on short theoretical information that can provide a clear answer to the questions of the seminar or the assignment for out-of-class study. Philosophy does not provide such answers. The teaching of philosophy involves the formation of the skills of contextual, discursive analysis, aimed at clarifying the course of reasoning of a particular philosopher, which leads him to certain conclusions. The mentioned test organization achieves at least two goals: firstly, it familiarizes students with the aphorisms and important quotations of the classics of philosophy, shows their depth, and secondly it develops the skills of philosophical analysis and intensifies educational interest. An indirect, but pleasant, consequence is that students remember the names of philosophers and basic philosophical terms.
Trends in modern education are linked, on the one hand, to the desire to develop cultural competences and, on the other, to take into account the informational influence, using its opportunities. The philosophical courses, especially philosophy, are directly meant for the formation of beliefs and convictions, values, systemic and scientific worldview. Therefore, the significant reduction or even the complete exclusion of philosophy from higher education in favour of majors jeopardizes the realization of the stated educational priorities. The creation an e-learning environment will help to simplify and universalize a significant number of types of activities dealt with memorizing information and providing control, so lectures have more time for other activities. First of all, these are activities directly related to communication, which is an integral part of the philosophy training. Moodle can be used as a tool of the online support of the philosophy course, but it is not possible to transfer a full amount of discipline into the virtual space, as this course has a considerable ideological load. This is due to the dialogic, discursive, communicative and pluralistic nature of philosophy. However, taking into account the peculiarities of the discipline, it is possible to provide not only the evaluative function of test control, but also to realize a number of educational functions: the updating of basic knowledge, memorization, activation of cognitive interest, the development of ability to reason and more simple, but not less important, – the skill to familiarize oneself with information.
We should note that the use of e-learning environment on the one hand imposes
certain restrictions on the educators and creates a risk of “mechanical” passage of the
course by the students. At the same time, it encourages the teacher to develop new and
rethink existing forms of learning in order to fully implement them in e-learning support
systems [
The peculiarities of the use of Moodle as a tool in the philosophy teaching can be extended to other courses, not just the humanities. They open the prospect of using test tools not only as a control but also as an effective learning tool. Moodle tools such as essays and seminars are promising to assess the level of idea formation, the ability to express and reason students’ own opinions, but they also have their own implementation specifics, which we will highlight in future research.