Abstract:

With the increasing prevalence of virtual learning platforms in university education, it is crucial to understand how students engage with these platforms and the potential benefits of using learning aids to support their learning.

This study aimed to examine whether the students use learning aids on a virtual campus and assess the correlation with their exam scores with the final objective to identify ways to improve student’s learning.

We analyzed the analytical data from our Virtual platform of Physiology and Pathophysiology I, first academic semester subject of the second year of Pharmacy, for the years 2021-2022 and 2022-2023. Specifically, we evaluated the visualization of four lessons (3, 10, 14 and 24), which are the most characteristic of the syllabus (30 lessons) which are presented during the first, fourth, seventh and eleventh week of the course, as well as seminar learning material. We obtained the total number of visualizations and the number of users for that visualized each lesson and finally the number of students that visualized all four lessons. Then, a correlation with exams scores was investigated.

We found that students that visualized at least one of the lessons were 341 in 2021-22 and 363 in 2022-23, which represent approximately 80% of all students. In fact, more than 50% of these students used the material of the four lessons.

The number of students that have visualized one lesson were 65 (19%) and 42 (12%); two lessons 42 (12%) and 44 (12%); three lessons 56 (16%) and 70 (19%) and four lessons 179 (52%) and 207 (57%), for the years 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 respectively and considering total participation (341 in 2021-22 and 363 in 2022-23).

We have also calculated the percentage of visualization of the different learning aids analyzed and we observed a decrease in both the visualization (30%) and the number of users from lesson 3 to lesson 24 (20%approximately). This trend is more pronounced in the case of seminars, where the visualizations dropped by 50% in 2021-22 and 56% in 2022-23 and the number of participants decreased by 40% in both courses.

Moreover, significant correlations between students' use of learning aids on the Virtual Campus and their exam scores were found when considering all these data together.Thus, in year 2021-22 of the 414 students, 60% get a final exam score of 5-6, 4% of 7-8 and 1% 9-10 while among the students that visualize all four lesson (179) this percentages increase to 69%, 6% and 2%, respectively. In a similar way in year 2022-23 from 56%, 11% and 1% corresponding to the global course (448 students), the percentage slightly increase to 58%, 17% and 2% when considering only the students that visualize the four lessons (207).
These findings suggest that visualizing learning aids on a Virtual Campus can effectively support student learning and improve exam performance. However, it is important to continue evaluating and optimizing these aids to ensure they meet the diverse learning needs of students.

The potential benefits of using visualization tools in education extend beyond the Virtual Campus and could be applied to other areas such as experiential learning and skills development. Ongoing research and evaluation of virtual learning platforms will be essential in ensuring that they continue to support student success in an increasingly digital world.

This study is part of the project REDICE22-3364.

Keywords:

Learning aids, virtual platforms, scores, student performance.