ASSESSMENT BY THE STUDENTS OF ACTIVITIES TO IMPROVE THE ACQUISITION OF COMPETENCES ON THE SUBJECT ORGANIC CHEMISTRY IN THE DEGREE IN CHEMISTRY

The renovation of teaching methodologies should be focused on improving student learning. They must be promoted those methodologies that allow the achievement of the formative aims and the competences of each discipline in the frame of the undergraduate degree.
Teacher has to propose training evaluable activities to facilitate the progressive assimilation of the contents of the subject. Thus, the assessment becomes continuous and the teacher can make a greater and better monitoring of progress in the student learning.

Continuous assessment provides greater assurance of passing the subject. First, because students have gradually assimilated the most important concepts; secondly, because they know how the evaluation by the teacher is; thirdly, ongoing evaluation should prepare students for exams because, for consistency, these will have the same structure as the proposed activities throughout the entire course.
The ongoing evaluation activities can be of various types depending on the subject and on which degree is included. In the field of Organic Chemistry, activities may include exercises related to the structure of organic compounds, three-dimensional representation of these compounds, synthetic methods for their preparation, mechanisms of the reactions involved, proposals synthetic routes, debates on current affairs, interpretation of related daily events ... In short, the possibilities are vast.

On the other hand, the use of the Moodle platform is, without doubt, a very important educational tool to support or complement the classroom university teaching.

Since the Faculty of Science at Burgos University adapted their study programmes of Chemistry to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), we have incorporated new methodologies in order to facilitate the acquisition of skills and competences in the subject of “Organic Chemistry I” in the second year of Chemistry Degree.

The objectives we proposed to get were:
• Facilitate the assimilation and the progressive development of contents of the subject and the competencies to be achieved
• Get a rough idea of the time spent by the student in the preparation of the subject.

For this reason, a programming of tasks orientated towards the acquisition of competences has been developed:
• Perform a series of activities related to the matter dealt with in class.
• Answer a questionnaire online at the end of each topic of the subject.
• Carry out an assessment tests at the end of each topic of the subject.
• Provide the students interactive exercises to solve voluntarily at the end of each topic.
• Provide students with a series of videos and flash concerning the matter explained in each topic of the subject

This methodology has been implemented in several courses since the 2009-2010 academic year.

The evaluation of the course also includes performing two exams of resolution of issues and problems that students should not have trouble to overcome if they have actually performed the activities proposed throughout the course.

In this paper we present the results of the different methodologies used in this project. For the evaluation of the results after the implementation of the mentioned methodology we have used satisfaction student surveys.