Abstract:

The current trends in higher education (at university as well as in professional studies) emphasizes an adequate integration of generic and specific competences in effective learning activities. These should be adapted to changing and complex educational contexts in which both presential and online autonomous learning needs to be optimally organized in order to adapt it to personal working paces of students. This requires students the ability to create diversified products from learning activities, not only from the content viewpoint, but also from the formal aspects, using different forms of expression.

During the last decades, information and communication technologies (ICT) have become a valuable tool in addressing these challenges. On the one hand, they provide resources to access to information and new formats for the students productions. On the other hand, they contribute and make team work easier, providing a high fluidity and methodological diversity to the interaction between the students themselves and among them and the teachers. At the same time, the integration in teaching of different expression forms using both textual and visual resources, as well as the possibility of accessing the web from them, improve its pedagogical value against traditional resources.

Within these technological tools, this work focuses on the use of screencasts from the perspective of their production by students. Several reasons support their use in the classroom: firstly, they integrate various communication skills related to images and oral and written texts; secondly, they are extensively versatile in terms of their role in the learning process. Finally, they may be easily created through free tools that provide audiovisual products of reasonable quality without the need for a great experience in their use.

Despite the fact that the majority of research related to educational use of screencasts is referred to teacher resources, some contributions deal to their elaboration by the students, with different aims such as meaningful learning enhancement. Indeed, they are considered an optimal way for designing activities involving processes of inquiry and relationship among concepts. For this reason, they are also a good starting point for the formative assessment. Another option, in which this work can be placed, is the elaboration and systematization of information so that it can be shared inside the group. Apart from these content centered contributions, this communication emphasizes their role as a way for developing generic competences related to Science-Society-Technology relationships.

Over two years, a total of 160 students belonging to an introductory organic chemistry for Food Science and Technology have taken part in this study grouped in teams of three members. All of them developed their work about foods of vegetable origin, about which the following aspects were studied:
(1) molecular structure and physic-chemical properties of their most representative compounds using 3D representations by means of suitable software
(2) nutritional and health issues from a Science-Society-Technology perspective.

Teacher assessment and co-assessment was applied by means of a designed rubric for the purpose. Likewise, a survey was also carried out in order to analyze in which extent the acquisition of generic competences was perceived by students.

Keywords:

Screencast, organic chemistry, competences.