Abstract:

With a strong background in general organic chemistry, reaction mechanisms and some industrial processes related to food industries, Agricultural Food Chemistry is a subject that has been thought for students in the fourth course of the Chemistry degree at the University of Extremadura.
The Chemistry degree in our University has been modified according to the proposed Spanish model in order to adapt it to the European Higher Education, being set up in 2009. When teaching a new course, developing a good set of instructional materials gets to be a challenging, time-consuming task. In this paper we present how Moodle1,2 can be used as a common platform to integrate modular teaching.
In this sense, our proposal to enable the learning of this subject involves using the Virtual Classroom, currently available in most of the Universities. The students have access, in each unit, apart from the corresponding slides and problems, to a great number of scientific articles, reviews and news related to each topic.
We hypothesize that such an integrated approach helps students to better appreciate the interconnectedness of knowledge acquired in different modules in Agricultural Food Chemistry as carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, flavors, pigments, food preservatives, food additives, and insecticides, which in turn also stimulate their interest in the modules in chemical education.

Keywords:

Chemistry degree, Agricultural Food Chemistry, Moodle platform, integrate modular teaching.