Abstract:

The aim of the phytopharmacy course is to present in a scientific and objective way, the risk assessment and the procedures used in both the industries and the public services to hand out authorizations such as pesticides registration for pesticides. Those products are a source of discussions and controversies in our society. Since most of the topics covered during the lessons are directly linked to those problems, the professor invites field experts so they can illustrate the lesson instead of giving a classical ex cathedra course. The idea is to present the problem in a professional context in order to sensitize the students with this problematic. This way of giving lessons should motivate the students and show them how this course will help in “real life”. But in fact, students are not really active during the talks and only a few of them take part in the discussions. It seems that ignorance of the subject frightens some of them who prefer to remain silent. To solve this problem, the professor has introduced a new learning activity including collaborative preparation of the topic with Diigo, a social bookmarking website which allows different users to bookmark and tag the same webpages in a shared online library. When using Diigo, small groups of students have to select and analyze different publications related to the topic. The professor supervises the selection and guides the students in their research. From the gathered information, students have to create 5 questions which they will have to ask to the expert. This experiment was conducted in a Master class of Bio Engineering at the Gembloux Agro Bio Tech faculty (University of Liege, Belgium). From results based on surveys of students, through this activity the professor acts not only on the motivation but also on his relationship with his students.

Keywords:

e-learning, Diigo, motivation, collaborative work, bibliography, Web 2.0.