Abstract:

Student work will become the axis of the education activities in the European Space for Higher Education. Thus, teachers are supposed to innovate in scheduling and teaching in order to facilitate and evaluate self-learning. Independently of the followed methodologies, student motivation is crucial in the teaching-learning process. A good scheduling of a particular subject is also necessary for quality teaching. In this work, I explained my experience on scheduling and inducing student motivation in the subject “Use of Biotechnology in the Conservation of Genetic Resources”. In order to schedule this subject several factors have been analyzed: 1) the kind of subject (mandatory/elective); 2) the content; 3) the number of students; 4) the timetable and 5) the possible overlapping. After analysing these factors, the following statements have been pointed: 1) It is an elective subject thus, students will be intrinsically motivated and probably receptive to the introduction of new methodologies; 2) the content of this particular subject cover a wide range of knowledge, thus, it will need to be structured in parts. On this matter, several possibilities were considered and, finally, the content has been structured in three parts: Biotechnology and knowing of biodiversity; Biotechnology and biodiversity conservation and Biotechnology and biodiversity use; 3) the number of students enrolled is 16. This amount facilitates the application of several teaching possibilities; 4) the timetable was three hours session ones a week. This lead to combine several activities in each session in order to maintain student attentive and 5) the screening of content from other related subjects has permitted to detect overlapping. Once the subject has been scheduled, I take into account two major points in order to motivate students 1) to avoid overlapping testing student at the initial part of the subject by introducing and making open queries and 2) to perform several research activities that motivate students and help them in their self-learning process. These activities included: 1) to give research appointments and introduce personal research comments in the lectures; 2) the selection and extraction of information from research papers; 3) to visit research laboratories and webs related with the subject and 4) to carry out practices planed in order to permit students initiate a process that has to be monitored by themselves during several weeks (depending on the practice) until the end of the experiment. As a whole, this experience has resulted time-consuming but very satisfactory for both, students and the teacher. Students have appreciated schedule and the avoidance of overlapping. On the other hand, this active teaching approach supported by research experiences have greatly motivate learning besides to promote a good interaction among student groups and teacher-students.

Keywords:

innovation, motivation, self learning, research projects.