Abstract:

Nutrition and Ageing is a subject taught by the Campus Andaluz Virtual (CAV). The CAV forms a fundamental part of the Universidad Digital project run under the auspices of the Andalucian Regional Government’s Council for Innovation, Science and Business (Consejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa de la Junta de Andalucía). It includes the incorporation of new teaching methods and the application of information and communications technology to the educational process, and the generation and transfer of knowledge, electronic management and administration to allow the university to adapt to the new challenges of the 20th century (Aguaded-Gómez, Infante-Moro, 2009). Ten Andalucian universities are taking part in the project. During the academic year 2011 – 2012 there were 86 free-choice subjects included in the syllabus.
The course entails 6 credits, 3 theoretical and 3 practical, with a maximum admission of 100 students per year. The teletraining platform is Moodle and it incorporates into the structure of the course such resources as web-page links, animation and illustrations of the subject matter, access to a glossary, illustrative videos and so on. Teaching and dialogue with the students takes place via forums, mail and chatting. Student assessment is undertaken by on-line activities and examinations.
We present here the evaluation of this subject made by the students of the academic years 2006-2007 to 2010-2011 (450 students) on the basis of questionnaires composed by the CAV. These consist of 54 items grouped into 9 blocks of questions about: course planning, course content, participation and interaction, activities and resources, structure and navigation, multimedia elements, language and composition, accessibility and evaluation of the course in general.
The overall results demonstrate that the methods and resources applied to the teaching of nutrition made the teaching of the subject easier and increased the students’ motivation. On a scale of 1 to 6, 73.2% of the students rated the subject at 5 or above. Similar scores were obtained when they were asked whether they were willing to follow other CAV courses, which corroborates that this kind of educational method is increasingly finding favour with the students.

Keywords:

Nutrition, aging, e-learning experience.