Abstract:

Nowadays, the active role of the students in their own learning process is demanded by the teachers who intend to work based on this philosophy. A possible way of approaching is based on the use of educative videos and the students’ prior documentation reading supplied by the professor. In this study, we used this methodology to teach a specific theme which integrates Hydrotherapy unit of the course General Physiotherapy. This course is located in the first semester of second year of Physiotherapy Degree at University of Vigo. Our objective was to explore the students’ opinion on such experience with educative video.

In order to achieve the objective, at the end of the educative experience, an ad hoc questionnaire was filled by the students where their opinion on the development of the activity was reflected. 45 of the 56 enrolled students in the course of General Physiotherapy participated in the study. The activity and its subsequent evaluation were held in the academic year of 2013-2014.

Our main results reflected a positive assessment on the good work environment, the explanations given by the teacher after the autonomous studying, the facilitation of learning, the adequate learning/teaching space used, the preference for the employed methodology instead of the traditional one, and the high level of comprehension and understanding of the proposed theme. In relation to the aspects with lowest rating we could list timeline (on the one hand there was much time to develop the activity as a whole, on the other hand there was few time to the in-person part of the activity), the fact that there was an exam after the activity (few students also pointed it as positive in order of retaining knowledge), and the lack of prior documentation reading (self-criticism).

In conclusion, we would stress that this experience was positively assessed by the students in order to promote subjects comprehension and knowledge acquisition. But still, we could not affirm that the extended use of this methodology in the rest of the course would also be positively assessed by the students.

Keywords:

Active learning, Educational video, Physiotherapy.