A CASE APPLIED OF LEARNING INNOVATION USING EDUCATIONAL VIDEOS FOR THE ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING SUBJECT

The purpose of this article is to present a research that has been carried out with 90 students in the second semester of the first course of the Degrees in Mechanical Engineering in the Top Technical School of Industrial Engineering. The investigation describes the use of educational video as reinforcement of knowledge regarding the subject of Environmental Engineering. This initiative arose from a learning innovation project developed in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of La Rioja during the 2016-2017 school year. This experience consists of the elaboration of multimedia materials by the teacher related to each of the lessons of the subject of Environmental Engineering. Video has become an important and useful tool for working in the classroom because of it allows each student to repeat the video as many times as desired and is a visual and attractive resource for the student. On the other hand, make a video that fits in every lesson and be effective is really complicated. For this reason, the EDpuzzle tool has been used to convert any video into an educational lesson in a quick and intuitive way. The videos that have been used by the teacher have been obtained from the YouTube platform and later edited. In order to know if our students pay attention and have understood the contents of the videos, they have been added open questions along the same. In this way, an online space implemented in the Moodle platform was implemented, and where these multimedia materials can be found and reproduced in a simple, interactive and free form, from any device with Internet connection. Three content areas were covered by the different videos: Different processes of wastewater treatment plants, advanced processes to eliminate atmosphere pollutants that are produced in industrial processes, and treatment and disposal methods of solid and hazardous waste, that correspond to the three main parts of the Environmental Engineering subject. The present paper analyses the academic results obtained in the subject of Environmental Engineering and the results of a personal final questionnaires applied to students. The purpose to the questionnaires was to obtain information about the methodology followed in the research. The results indicated that a majority of students used the video frequently, rated them as useful or very useful, viewed them as easy to use, effective learning tools, and reported significant knowledge gains in different concepts of the environmental engineering subject. The most appreciated benefits were an improvement of the understanding of the theoretic concepts previously studied as well as the facility of access to the contents. Throughout this study, the positive global perception and satisfaction of the participants after the implementation of the learning tool must be highlighted. Therefore, online educational videos based methods can be used as effective learning tools in subjects related to environmental engineering at university educational levels. The results obtained allow us to conclude that the assimilation of knowledge is much greater through this methodology, in which students are protagonists of their learning.