Active learning by doing strategies in food technology

Enfoque

Active learning by doing strategies in food technology

Introduction

The learning -by-doing methodology based on active, student-centered approaches are replacing traditional teaching models at high education levels. In engineering, active learning facilitates the acquisition of basic knowledge and certain skills including teamwork, problem-solving, communication and entrepreneurial mindset. The conventional flipped classroom provides the students with basic information in the form of videos, but students are more involved in-person strategies. Thus, recently, videos are substituted by seminars dealing with the fundamental topics of the subjects. The combination of flipped classroom with learning-by-doing and virtual exchange help the students to become socially interactive and engaged with their peers and others and the material they are learning.

Objetives

In this experience we used a combination of flipped classroom, learning-by-doing and virtual international exchange in the optative subject Food Technology, 4^th year Chemical Engineering Degree at the Universidad de Cantabria (UC). The motivation and acquired commitment of students with the subject were analyzed during the whole semester..

Methodology

The students received the fundamentals of the subject during theoretical sessions. The resources were available along the semester and completed by the students by small tasks in Moodle platform, associated with the concepts after each session. The students were divided in groups to work on the case studies each related with a food group technology. The teamwork was monitored along the semester regarding the theoretical fundamentals and the individual problem-solving where the students used chemical engineering tools from previous years in food industry related topics. The defense of the group case study, which was realized in previous years in a single session at the end of the academic year, was substituted by a poster competition mid-term and a final oral presentation, where the students explained the advancements of their work and the solution of one of the individual problems to the rest of the class. By using a digital rubric in Microsoft Forms, both the posters and final presentations were peer-reviewed by them as a competition-based group dynamics. A classification rubric was also available for the lecturers’ jury to untie the outcome of the peer-review evaluation if needed. Two of the problems were performed in collaboration with the Separation Processes class of the Chemical Engineering Degree of Montana State University (MSU) to provide the students with international exchange and keep motivation levels high between both presentation dynamics.

Results

The major outcome has been that the attendance of the students both in theoretical, problem sessions and group sessions reached 100% during the whole semester. The students prepared and defended satisfactorily their materials to the rest of teams in different sessions. The peer-review evaluation agreed with the lecturers’ appreciation, so the untie classification rubric was not necessary. Grades ranged from 7 to 9.5 over 10. Students expressed satisfaction with all the practices offered them regarding continuous evaluation and admitted that they learned more easily than having a final exam at the end. They found that the acquired skills for material divulgation elaboration was useful in other subjects. They loved the international exchange and expressed the wish to interact longer with their peers from abroad.

Conclusiones

Flipped Classroom, competitive group dynamics and international exchange, even virtual, increase the implication and motivation of students with the subject content and control of their own learning.