Abstract:

Background:
For Physical Therapy undergraduate students, it becomes a challenge to understand the meaning of several specific concepts learnt in subjects such as Anatomy, Physiology, Neuroscience, Pathophysiology, and so on. These subjects include specific vocabulary that usually is not easy to understand. Therefore, according to the proposals of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), the utilization of new teaching and learning methods is needed to improve the quality of education. Undoubtedly, the implementation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the teaching process, can play a significant role as a learning resource, due to its instantaneous access and ease of use.

The purpose of our project is to create a student generated glossary, were undergraduates could build its content, taking advantage of ICT.

Methods:
Each first year student in the Degree of Physiotherapy which initiated the studies in the academic course 2015/16 (n=179) was invited to take part in the project. Students were encouraged to provide 3 different specific terms used in Anatomy, Physiology, Neuroscience, Pathophysiology and Kinesiology with the following instructions: 1) use the recommended scientific literature, and 2) explain its meaning briefly (25-30 words). Before inclusion in the glossary, duplicates were identified and the content was supervised by the teaching staff. Every suitable term was incorporated into a database, which was finally included in an online glossary (available in: www.uv.es/fisiotics/indexlexic.html).

Results:
168 students took part in the generation of the glossary (93.8%). We included 504 entries in the database. After carefully reviewing the terms, definitions and identifying duplicates, 160 were included in the on-line glossary (32%), which was made available to all the students.

Conclusions:
We elaborated an on-line database with terms provided by first-year students in the Degree of Physiotherapy. Students seemed to be motivated towards this collaborative initiative, given the high participation. More precise instructions should be given to the students in order to avoid duplicates and improve the quality of the content.

Keywords:

Glossary, ICT, undergraduate student, User generated content.