USE OF NEW MULTIMEDIA TEACHING PLATFORMS AS SUPPORT FOR TEACHING-LEARNING IN MATERIALS SCIENCE

In the last years the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) has made an important effort to develop and use new and attractive multimedia platforms to enable teacher-student interaction and communication. In particular, these platforms represent an interesting tool to optimize the teaching-learning process in engineering education, characterized by high practical and technical information. So that, these platforms can be useful as support for teaching-learning in Materials Science.

Among the different multimedia tools developed at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, it is important to remark the enormous success of PoliformaT platform. This multimedia platform allows the teacher to offer learning materials to students (theory, practical sessions, interesting links, complementary material, etc.); furthermore, these platforms offer a rapid communication channel between the teacher and the students in the course.

PoliformaT is a dynamic (with continuous improvement and new features) multimedia platform with different and attracting functionalities. It represents a direct communication tool between the teacher and the students of a particular subject. Some applications are addressed to teachers and other features are specific for students. For example, the teacher can upload different electronic files (PDF, video, word, power point, etc.) containing relevant information about the subject and these files can be structured in folders and subfolders as in a typical table of contents. Another interesting feature for teachers is a text editing tool with typical features of Microsoft Word and similar. It is possible to schedule a full sequence of activities (exams, practical sessions, expositions, etc.) in a calendar and send advertisements to students (i.e. start of practical sessions, data limit to send a work, etc.).

Also, PoliformaT acts as a forum for the subject in which, students, teachers and other invited persons can discuss about the content of the subject. The teacher acts as the webmaster of the forum and he can invite experts to participate in the subject forum. This is a small sample of the potential features of PoliformaT for teachers.

Regarding the features for students, they can upload their works in electronic format; use the forum for tutorship tasks, etc. The use of PoliformaT at UPV is generalized due to the benefits that it gives for both the students and teachers (high levels of interactivity). In addition to this, it is important to say that this is a dynamic education platform as new features are continuously added.

The use of this teaching-learning platform in Materials Engineering is interesting as there are lots of features that can be used by teachers and students to improve the teaching learning process and the most important thing is that the use of this platform is increasing every year.