Abstract:

The aim of the present work was to assess the management of the delivery of practical activities of students to instructor using a web tool, allowing keep track of them. The study was conducted on the subject of Animal Nutrition in the Veterinary Medicine Degree of the University of Murcia. The delivery of each exercise was performed by the tool “Tasks” in the virtual learning platform, called “Aula Virtual”. A total of 3 tasks about feed formulation were designed, with deadline dates, during the second term of the 2014/2015 academic year. The student had an online text editor to answer and/or solve the task and could also send attachments. After the submission, the instructor could evaluate it, adding comments and corrections. At the end of the term, a 4-question survey was conducted to evaluate the degree of satisfaction of the students on the use of this tool (n=89). In addition, the website usage statistics were consulted. There was a positive opinion of the students on the tool “Tasks”, reaching a value of 4.2±0.8 using an increasing 5-point scale. The tool was used by 94 % of students of this subject, and there were 259 connections to use this tool in the “Aula Virtual” from February to May. Thus, the instructors of the subject expressed the intention of using the tool “Tasks” in next academic courses as a way to monitor the delivery of practical activities, avoiding the email abuse with the consequent disorganization or the face to face delivery of each activity.

Keywords:

Virtual learning platform, tool task manager, satisfaction survey.