IMPLEMENTATION OF AUDIO-VISUAL MATERIAL ON NETWORK AS A FACILITATOR OF SIGNIFICANT LEARNING

Audio-visual material is a tool to facilitate the natural process of learning. They incorporate visual and audio techniques that will serve as a support to didactic lectures or individual learning, facilitating to our students a greater and more rapid understanding and interpretation of some basic and fundamental concepts of the subject of Pharmacology. The use of audio-visual tutorials has an appreciated and valuable benefit in the teaching-learning process fostering a significant and orderly learning. One of the features that offers audio-visual material at the University level is offer to the students a learning environment that allows a quickly access to a varied information.

Current scientific and technological advances prompt many educators around the world to call for new models for educating health professionals that better reflects the reality and the new “wide” society these students will be serving. So, we think that the educators require innovative mechanism to cultivate new global thought and a multi-disciplinary collaborative working environment to develop more systematic and friendly approaches to the curriculum especially in the case of Pharmacology characterized by fast scientific advances and constant conceptual changes in regard to the complex molecular mechanisms of drugs that bring complexity and a rejection mentality emerges which makes the integration process harder.

It is important that students should assume that access to the information that we find or generate through the audio-visual environment does not mean a direct knowledge about the different issues developed within the curriculum of the subject. It requires a previous process of study, research, and critical practice. As it has been already previously exposed for many authors, the use of these type of resources does not substitute for the construction of knowledge, it has a peripheral role in learning and cognition.

Under our experience, the purpose of the implementation of these networked audio-visual resources is to incorporate a motivating educational element that infer another way to relate the pharmacological contents, therefore they are designed and elaborated in close relationship between teachers of the team and a number of representative students. To collect the information and features that may be attractive we used instructional design in which coexist and combine face to face classroom teaching formats and online asynchronic learning (audio-visual, consisting in the use of tutorials) with the intention of selecting the most appropriate means for every educational need and to prompt the participation of teachers and students.

As a final step, we valued the educational power of the audio-visual resource as well as the response of students to the use of this resource of learning and as well as how the teachers values them as a resource for their lectures. The implementation of this type of resource in a traditional lectures format formation was not exempt of different type of problems, so that also benefit students because raises a critical analysis of the advantages and the shortcomings detected in the development and the use of such tools while they translate suggestions for improvement.