Abstract:

The Permanent Seminar of Educational Innovation (SPIE) of Biochemistry and Biotechnology, was created with the primary objective of forming a multidisciplinary teaching team, to coordinate activities and evaluations of basic materials related to Life Sciences in the following degrees: Nursing, Agricultural Engineering and Natural Environment, Elementary Education, Medicine, Psychology and Chemistry. This was done in 5 meetings and a virtual classroom was created to serve as a platform for the 18 participating professors to share the material of the 16 subjects under review and modification.

The work environment has been very good and it has been very enriching to share ideas and strategies on work and evaluation within this multidisciplinary group. The group has been very motivated from the first moment as evidenced by the attendance rate which was always greater than 70%, taking into account absences due to teaching.

As a result of the meetings, and with respect to the use of learning techniques based on problems or solving cases, prior to using them, it must be considered, supposing real learning, optimizing the way to do so no there is no excessive workload on the part of students and teachers. It has showed that the available hours of the subject as well as different levels of students is a problem.

Furthermore, with regards to the group work, it appears the students do not like it much and it is difficult to evaluate the individual work, so it would be convenient to perform different levels of evaluation and have more face time for conducting the activity. An alternative would be the use of collaborative wikis that have proven to work better and also allows for the individual student work to be followed in real time.

Finally, rubrics are used to evaluate the four core competencies: Self-learning; Ability of Deductive Logic; Ability in Laboratory Experimentation; and Critical thinking. These rubrics are relatively simple to facilitate the evaluation process and they have different indicators, depending on the subject, but only 3 levels of complexity. Also, they are accompanied by a list of activities so that the core competencies can be evaluated.

Keywords:

Biochemistry and Biotechnology, Life Sciences, Core Competencies, Teaching Team, Evaluation and Assessment, Rubrics.