ECTS ESTIMATION TO ADAPT THE SUBJECT ‘ADVANCED LABORATORY CHEMISTRY II’ TO THE EUROPEAN CONVERGENCE PROCESS

The European Community promotes studies abroad and inter-university cooperation as a means of improving the quality of education to benefit students and higher education institutions alike. Student mobility is a primary feature of this cooperation.

The new system of university education will focus on students’ integral training. Lecturers will have to do more than just give lectures as they will have to foster creative learning and encourage students to think for themselves. Learning will be a priority and students will be largely responsible for their own training.

The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) arises and develops alongside students’ mobility programmes in response to the need of a system of equivalences and recognition of studies done abroad.

Therefore, adopting the ECTS system will involve a conceptual reorganization of the education systems in order to adapt to the new training models that focus on students’ work and learning. This new perspective will be based on the idea that the ultimate aim of education is to get students to learn. Thus, the educational system is organized around the time and effort that a typical student must invest in studying and performing academic work.

The aim of this work is to study the adaptation of the laboratory subject ’Advanced Laboratory Chemistry II’ in the Chemistry degree at the Universitat Jaume I to the European convergence process. In order to acquire a broad data spectrum, it has been applied to three laboratory groups. The time and effort invested by students to perform the academic work and to study this subject were evaluated through several questionnaires. Students’ work has been continuously followed by the teacher in each laboratory session and through virtual classroom tutorials. All this information has permitted the evaluation of students’ predisposition to work and learn within this convergence process, and the similarity of ECTS calculated theoretically with those that students currently use has also been checked.

This work has been supported by projects from the USE (Unitat de Suport Educatiu, Universitat Jaume I) and from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (MEC) CTQ 200764473/BQU