Abstract:

The new concept for knowledge acquisition in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is focused on the basis that students play an active role on their own learning process. Therefore, the new educational models are based on integral formation, connexion with enterprises and, most important, improvement of personal talents through development of instrumental, interpersonal and systematic competences. For a proper teaching-learning environment it is in consequence mandatory to follow an integral educational program that considers the face-to-face instruction and self-learning activities as a whole, in the understanding of the utmost importance of the out of class students’ time.

Following this idea, in this contribution we propose the implementation of some virtual technological tools during the self-learning time of the subject “Chemistry”, which is being taught in the first year of the mathematics degree at the University of Alicante (Spain). For that purpose, two virtual tools have been selected: laboratory video-tutorials and virtual laboratories. Both have been considered in a complete teaching methodology that, properly integrated with the face-to-face lectures, pursues the two main objectives that follow: i) be a solid reinforcement of the concepts developed in class and ii) have enough scientific entity to launch new ideas on the less developed items during the face-to-face lectures. These technological resources have been selected based on the following criteria: i) adequacy of the proposal to the context, available resources and students profile; ii) coherence, understood as the congruence between proposed actions and scope of each activity; iii) functionality of the planned activities in order to solve specific needs; iv) relevance, since the proposed activities must cover an important spectrum able to give answers to detected needs; v) sufficiency, understood as the level of achieved development on the bases of some defined minimums of quality and quantity; and vi) satisfaction, given that students must feel comfortable in the balance of preliminary expectative, employed efforts and achieved results.

Keywords:

European Higher Education Area, self-learning activities, virtual technological tools, laboratory video-tutorials, virtual laboratory.