Abstract:

The European Higher Education Area promotes the implementation of proposals for innovation and self-learning among university students to improve their learning process.

The current work describes the experience and its impact on teaching and learning on first-year students of the subject “Chemical Principles of Engineering”, in the laboratory practices of this subject. A large number of theses students is not adequately trained before starting laboratory practices as many of them did not study chemistry at high school nor worked in laboratories before.

Before going to the laboratory the students watch the video which shows the how the practice must be done. The videos were filmed by previous year’s students and the best ones were chosen and were available in a space in the virtual platform.

The aim of this work was to improve their preparation before doing the laboratory practices, enhanced their interest in experimental work and to develop the students’ self-learning skills.

We found the time it look the students to complete the experiments was reduced considerably, compared with those from previous years (who did not use the videos). The quality the experimental results was also improved, perhaps because they felt less stressed as they began to discover and make use of the materials and the equipment during their experiments.

On the other hand, we analyze engineering students’ perception of Chemistry practices by collecting their opinions about the videos’ usefulness by using anonymous questionnaires.

Keywords:

Educational Videos, Self-learning, Flipped Classroom.