USE OF BLOGS AND WIKIS AS DIDACTIC RESOURCES IN AN ORGANIC CHEMISTRY COURSE

The focus of methodological adaptation connected to the implementation of the future European Space of Higher Education (ESHE) lies on the concept of competences. In this sense, we are realizing in our Department various investigations oriented toward the development of high-level competences of students in Organic Chemistry courses. For this objective we aim at the integration between specific competences (connected to our specific environment of knowledge) and generic and transversal competences. In both cases we make intensive use of technological environments and resources connected to Web 2.0, especially blogs and wikis.
The presented investigation was realized during three years with a total of 115 students of the course in Organic Chemistry in the first year of the career Technical Industrial Engineering (specialization Chemistry) at the University of Huelva, Spain. The aim of the project was the verification of the effects of these complementary methodologies in the development of competences related to scientific research, information management, and team work. The principal characteristics of our educational proposal are the following: i) development of course contents (Industrial Organic Chemistry) through team work on open questions, which integrate scientific interest with technological and social aspects, ii) formulation as webquest; iii) application of Web 2.0 resources (blog and wiki) to create a real community of knowledge between the students; iv) shared evaluation by students (auto-evaluation and evaluation in peers) and professors, using pre-agreed criteria.
The obtained results show that the blogs keep the interest of the students high and promote a continuous compromise during the development of the work in teams, thus, avoiding the accumulation of tasks until the end of the agreed deadline. The global evaluation of the obtained results has been good, with special emphasis on the quality of the presentations and the created wikis. With regard to the development of competences, a major part of the students recognized that the activity has improved their capacity to search, analyze, and synthesize information. On the other hand, ca. 90% of the students felt motivated by the activity and recognized the benefits of working in a team to solve complex problems. Furthermore, 93% of the consulted students recognized the positive influence of the applied evaluation system for the development of the educational activity. The students confirmed that the realized activity helped them to achieve more autonomy (68 %) and the facilitated understanding of course contents, which have been not explained beforehand (74 %). The overall experience of using resources of modern information technology in the context of an Organic Chemistry course is very positive. Based on these observations, the application of this methodological tool has found use in other Organic Chemistry courses in our Department at the University of Huelva.