DEVELOPMENT OF AN OPEN COURSEWARE (OCW) WITH AUDIO-VISUAL MATERIAL TO SUPPORT THE STUDY OF THERMODYNAMICS AND THERMAL ENGINEERING

The increased use of Information and Communication Technologies in higher education has allowed to support and enhance the teaching-learning processes. It also has favoured the widespread development of Open Educational Resources (OER), including the Open Courseware (OCW) initiatives, which provide free and open access to the knowledge produced by the universities for any individual learner worldwide.

This paper presents the main activities carried out in a teaching innovation project financed by the University of Zaragoza (UZ, Spain) within the OER Programme. This project is a continuation and an extension of the work carried out in the last two years, in which a set of educational videos has been developed, as modular and reusable learning objects. During this time, the authors have detected a clear improvement in the teaching-learning process in a total of seven subjects in the field of Thermal Engineering, taught in five different degree courses. Although, to date, these educational videos have been made only available to enrolled students in the internal Moodle platform of the UZ, from this year the complete set of videos is published within the OCW platform of the UZ.

The OCW has been designed as a compilation of audio-visual material to support teaching in subjects in the field of Thermodynamics and Thermal Engineering. Thus, the materials included in the OCW are mainly educational videos with theoretical explanations and some practical training exercises. All the videos have a homogeneous format and duration, and are licensed under a Creative Commons license. Each video is accompanied by a brief description, which includes the title, author, license for use, summary and contents index, as well as a list of subjects in which the video can be used as complementary teaching material. In addition, after each video, a short self-assessment questionnaire is proposed to learners to check their assimilation and understanding degree of the contents explained.

Finally, the paper presents the students feedback on the usefulness of the above mentioned materials to support the learning process in a subject taught this academic year. The results so far show that these materials have helped to improve students' understanding of the most abstract and complex concepts, while at the same time contributing to increase their level of motivation.