Abstract:

Effective learning involves carrying out academic activities that involve emotion, that motivate, that encourage creativity and that can be done for pleasure. Students' daily use of digital devices and audiovisual formats makes these tools one of the many ways to learn by encouraging these aspects. Moreover, oral communication involves reflection, structuring, and prior understanding, and makes the student become the protagonist of their learning process and take responsibility. In this work, we present a teaching proposal integrated into the Teaching Innovation Project “Learning through Emotion: Learning by Communicating in Earth Sciences” (Faculty of Earth Sciences - Universitat de Barcelona), which aims to improve the content assimilation and oral communication skills of the students as well as to promote their own and collaborative work as a learning tool. To this end, a series of academic activities have been designed for the Landslide Hazard subject (Master's level), based on the study of real cases, oral presentations, and the use of ICTs in order to encourage motivation, creativity, and intellectual pleasure during learning.

The Internet offers information of undeniable quality, easily accessible, and of great pedagogical value. In the field of landslide hazards, The Landslide Blog (https://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/) hosted by AGU (American Geophysical Union) provides valuable and updated information on landslide events occurring worldwide. The learning activities proposed in this work are structured around real study cases selected by the lecturer from the blog to ensure the analysis of the most frequent landslide types.

All activities are developed in 9 steps:
1) The lecturer presents the learning action using a Genially platform interactive image;
2) Each student selects one of the proposed cases and compile relevant information about it;
3) Each student analyses the landslide characteristics, identifies the landslide type, and recognises the control and triggering factors (one virtual session is programmed and a forum tool is provided to the students to discuss and to solve doubts);
4) Each student selects and organizes the significant information about each case by building an interactive image in Genially;
5) Each student presents in front of their classmates each case using his/her interactive image; the presentation is recorded and uploaded to the educational platform for the rest of students to consult them;
6) Students peer evaluate the content and design of the interactive images and oral presentations based on the provided assessment guide;
7) For a predetermined period of time, students collaboratively compile all the information in a Google sheet table to synthesize the geomorphological characteristics, materials involved, mobilization mechanisms and control and triggering factors of the different types of landslides;
8) the synthetic table is discussed and completed in a synchronic session; and 9) students apply the acquired knowledge in the field where they have to recognize and describe different types of landslides with direct observations on the ground. Furthermore, students get used to and learn how to clearly present information through virtual tools, as Genially, useful for dissemination purposes.

Keywords:

Emotion, Communication skills, Real case studies, Information and communications technology.