Abstract:

Nowadays, the learning process at Universities is being promoted with the use of Information and Communication Technologies. For that reason, most of the Spanish Universities have developed virtual platforms that are being used as didactic support for the lectures with the aim to introduce their subjects into the Bologna Process. Since that time, European Union countries have to adapt their teaching and learning strategies to certain parameters. The students will have to devote more hours to their personal work and the teachers taught fewer lectures; therefore, new methods of learning will have to be devised in order to improve the teaching. Classical teaching experience is a mixture of different kinds of inputs, such as voice, non-verbal communication. The transmission of this set of senses through technological platforms is not easy, due to the great number of items that are lost along the way.
Following this line, University of Vigo has developed a few educational projects oriented to involve teachers and students on the intensive use of new learning technologies as in grade as in postgraduate disciplines. At University of Vigo, an e-learning platform (called Faitic) exists since 2003. Faitic itself is a frontend to the different software engines that support different areas and share the university databases and exchange processes between them. In the beginning, the virtual campus was mainly used by the teachers as a source of storage of contents. However, more recently the teachers are trying to adapt their teaching materials to a more dynamic process in order to improve the teacher-student interaction.
This research describes the work accomplished as well as the contents that have been included to reinforce the learning process and to promote students’ active and autonomous learning at the first course of Chemistry at University of Vigo. The aim of this course is the understanding of basic concepts and fundamental quantities of Chemistry, so that, later, they can apply them in their future. All the students of this subject can access to TeMa from the first day of the course. During the course presentation, the teacher informs to the students about the teaching method, which includes the use of the platform through the all course. The teacher divides the subject in different topics. Each topic contains two pdf files: one with the notes of theoric content and another with the list of problems, and knowledge pills of the most important basic concepts. On the other hand, the students are informed about the evaluation method. It is important to point out that TeMa allows to the students to see their own qualifications as well as interaction between teacher and students with the use of announcements.

Keywords:

e-learning platforms, higher education, chemistry, teacher-student interaction.