Abstract:

In the current scenario of progressive adaptation of the Spanish universities to the European Higher Education system, the coordination between different subjects within a particular degree is of key importance for student in order to achieve the required interdisciplinary competences.
This is of special relevance to Medicine, where students have to integrate all knowledge and skills achieved during their studies to become fully competent professionals. For this reason, traditional teaching is no longer applicable and the integration of different areas of knowledge to facilitate integration is the most intense and important activity.
The development of transversal activities has been reported as an effective mean to integrate skills and knowledge gained in different subjects. These transversal activities are highly diverse and include, among others, seminars, case-study activities, role-playing and WebQuests. Whereas case-study and role-playing activities require a deeper knowledge on the discipline, seminars and WebQuest are easily amenable for first and second year students. A WebQuest is an interactive web-based environment in which students solve problems through discovery and teamwork and can be used either as an exercise before a topic is discussed or as a follow-up assignment. In this work, a WebQuest exercise is proposed as a tool for the integration of genetics and cell biology within the degree in medicine in the University Jaume I. This is a novel proposal in this degree and given its strong potential to make students learn its implementation will facilitate the integration of information through the development of an interactive activity rather than by merging subject contents. In the present manuscript, all the aspects considered to implement this collaborative learning activity are exposed.

Keywords:

Internet, discovery, teamwork, transversality.