Abstract:

Animal Breeding is a branch of Animal Science focused on the genetic improvement of livestock populations to maximize desirable genetic traits towards more productive animals while reducing environmental impacts. Although animal breeding was practiced long before the science of genetics and other relevant disciplines were known, current breeding programs rely on sound quantitative genetics, population genetics, statistics, and more recently on molecular genetics. The research group of Animal Breeding of the University of León (ULE) in Spain, MEGA_ULE group, teaches the Animal Breeding Course in the Degrees of Veterinary Sciences and Agronomic Engineering offered at ULE. The members of this group also form the Group of Teaching Innovation (GTI) VetGeneULE of this university. With the aim of encouraging active learning, the VetGeneULE group has launched, in the academic course 2020-21, a collaborative glossary building project to promote active learning among the students of the Animal Breeding course of the Degree of Veterinary Sciences. This project is developed within the framework of a teaching innovation project funded by the ULE and consists in the development of a glossary of terms related to the basic concepts of quantitative genetics that settle the basis to understand the practical topics related to the technology of animal breeding in the different livestock species. The development of this glossary was performed during one of the practical sessions of the subject. In this session, each student was requested to extract all the terms and corresponding definitions from one of the chapters of the course. Assignment of chapters to students was performed at random. Whereas two students focused on the same chapter, individual work was promoted due to the COVID-19 pandemics. After one hour of individual work, the two students working on the same chapter were requested to exchanged their work, and they both reviewed the list of terms and definitions developed by their partner tracking all suggested changes. All the documents generated, the original work of each student and its reviewed version, were submitted to the practical session lecturer supervisor. Based on the material generated by the different groups of students, a website including all the terms and definitions reviewed by the course lecturers has been developed. This website has been presented to students as an online tool seeking help them to prepare their course final exam. A survey has been conducted to the students to assess how the participation in this collaborative project and the access to the glossary website have helped them to gain a better understanding of the fundamental concepts of animal breeding. This work collects the results and conclusions of this survey and the assessment of the collaborative glossary building project as a teaching innovation activity to promote student engagement and participation as well as critical and reflective thinking.

Keywords:

Glossary, collaborative project, animal breeding, active learning, critical thinking.