Abstract:

This study was conducted at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), with first year students of the Grado en Ciencia y Tecnología de Alimentos (Degree in Food Science and Technology), during the second half of the academic term 2011-2012. The course during which the study was performed was Fundamentos Químicos para la Ciencia y Tecnología de Alimentos (Foundations of Chemistry for Science and Food Technology).
The Plan Docencia en Red aims to encourage the UPV teachers to produce teaching resources in a multimedia form, referred to as Objetos de Aprendizaje (learning objects). These resources are planned and produced to assist the learning of our students.
In the previous term, the teacher had recorded an educational video explaining a basic laboratory experiment. The students were requested to (1) watch this video and (2) submit a “previous report”, both before having their practical lesson. This “previous report” included a simple problem which the students could correctly solve only after watching the video, because the procedure had not been explained in class.
During the practical lesson, the teacher observed how the students managed in the lab, and if they were able to carry out the experiment by themselves. At the end of the lesson, a “final report” had to be submitted individually. This second report included a problem in which the experimental data were used, and had to be solved following the same procedure used in the “previous report”. Before leaving the laboratory, the students were kindly requested to fill in an opinion questionnaire. We did this with the aim of gathering important information about the educational video, such as its usefulness. This valuable information will be considered when planning the production of new multimedia educational resources.