BLENDED LEARNING IN CHEMISTRY LABORATORY

The new paradigm for knowledgement acquisition in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is focused on the basis that students play and active role in their own learning process. The new educational models of academic formation are based on the concepts of integral formation, connexion with enterprises and, most important, improvement of personal talents through development of instrumental, interpersonal and systematic competences. For a proper teaching-learning environment it is in consequence mandatory to follow an integral educational program that considers the presential and non-presential activities as a whole, in the understanding of the utmost importance of the out of class students’ time.

From this point of view, it seems more than appropriate the use of a learning system that combines Internet and digital media with established classroom forms that require the physical co-presence of teacher and students, i.e. the blended learning.

In this contribution the authors make a proposal of implementation of virtual technological tools in non-presential activities with the aim of building a blended learning pedagogical framework for the subject “Chemistry”, which is being taught in the first year of the mathematics degree at the University of Alicante (Spain). Two virtual tools were selected for the mentioned purpose: video-tutorials and virtual laboratories.

Both were implanted in a complete teaching methodology that, properly integrated with presential lectures, pursues the two main objectives that follow:
i) be a solid reinforcement of the concepts developed in class and
ii) have enough scientific entity to launch new ideas on the less developed items in the presential lectures. In the specific proposal of this work, the authors present and discuss a complete methodology that encompasses different video-tutorials and virtual laboratory-guided practical classes.

These technological resources have been selected based on the following criteria:
i) adequacy, of the proposal to the context, available resources and students profile;
ii) coherence, understood as the congruence between proposed actions and scope of each activity;
iii) functionality, of the planned activities in order to solve specific needs;
iv) relevance, since the proposed activities must cover an important spectrum able to give answers to detected needs;
v) sufficiency, understood as the level of achieved development on the bases of some defined minimums of quality and quantity;
vi) satisfaction, given that students must feel comfortable in the balance of preliminary expectative, employed efforts and achieved results.