AN E-LEARNING PROJECT TO FACILITATE THE ELABORATION OF ACADEMIC-SCIENTIFIC WORKS IN HIGHER EDUCATION STUDIES

Introduction:
Time devoted to the supervision of the academic tasks by the teachers in the School of Psychology in the Universidad de Zaragoza is very high. The main reasons are the important deficiencies of the students in some general competencies:
a) information seeking in scientific sources,
b) analysis and synthesis of information, and
c) writing scientific papers according to academic standards.

Goals:
The goals of the present innovation project are:
1) To use an e-learning methodology for the improvement of the teaching-learning process of the academic standards for written tasks,
2) to generate innovative teaching materials that facilitate the learning-teaching process of those standards,
3) to reduce the required time for the teachers in the review of the academic deliveries due to format errors, redaction (plagiarism and APA style) or their structure.

Method:
Professors participating in this project will develop a set of short tutorials (Power points with audio) including instructions to facilitate the development of academic works, especially the final Psychology degree work and the final General Health Psychology Master work. Students will have access to these tutorials through the Moodle platform. In addition, after seeing the chosen tutorial students will complete a test regarding the content of that tutorial. Results will arrive to their supervising professor. Finally, students will be able to fill a survey about the tutorials utility and their opinion about the e-learning methodology used. We are conducting a pilot study with 50 students.

Results:
Through this presentation we will show results regarding the first two goals of the study, we will describe the tutorials made and the data obtained from the ad hoc survey. The data from the professor's perspective about the impact of this e-learning methodology will be analyzed at the end of the present academic course. We will present 7 audio-tutorials about:
1) Introduction of academic-scientific works;
2) How to do an information search;
3) The APA style;
4) How to write a systematic review;
5) How to write a meta-analysis;
6) How to elaborate an intervention program work (prevention, promotion, and treatment programs);
7) How to write a research study.

We hypothesize that the tutorials will receive a positive evaluation in comprehension and utility. We will present the means and standard deviations about the scores obtained through the survey.

Conclusions
The utilization of an e-learning methodologies at Higher Education Studies could have a positive influence on student's knowledge and competences. Base on this idea we are conducting this innovation project that use an e-learning methodology, that is audio tutorials, online tests and survey in Moodle platform, to achieve improvements in our students and professors at University of Zaragoza.