Audiovisual resources as a useful tool to improve the teaching of coastal engineering (marine science bsc degree)

Numerous graduates from American Universities apply for their degree homologation for the Marine Science certificate in Spain. The Spanish Ministry of Education supports this as long as they can pass an exam based on several subjects including Coastal Engineering at the University of Cadiz. The subject of Coastal Engineering is currently being taught in the third year of the BSc degree. This is a very specific subject and unfortunately there is no adequate bibliography that allows for the breadth of knowledge needed to pass the final exam. In addition, it may be difficult for foreign students to properly prepare the subject because they cannot attend the lessons at the campus. Therefore, an innovative project was proposed to create videos where lessons are explained. These files were uploaded to the Virtual Classroom. In this way, students of the Marine Science BSc degree were also encouraged to use these audiovisual resources because not all of the enrolled students were able to attend the classes as they had clashing schedules. On the other hand, some students have an Erasmus grant and their knowledge of Spanish has not reached the required level in terms of assimilating all the given explanations. Enabling these audiovisual resources would be very useful for their studies, not only from a technical but also from a linguistic point of view. The exams from the last few years were solved and explained in documents that were also uploaded later to the Virtual Classroom in order to facilitate the study of the subject. This represented a valid and helpful alternative way in which students could prepare for their final exam. During the months of September and October a grantee was hired to assist the preparation of all the teaching material. From November to January, several PowerPoint files were prepared (including formulations, summaries and practical solved exercises) and oral explanations were implemented. The performance of the audiovisual resources was facilitated by the free software Active Presenter (http://atomisystems.com/activepresenter/). The students completed a satisfaction survey about the quality and usefulness of the audiovisual lectures, in order to assess the levels of interest and success that were achieved. According to the results obtained, these audiovisual resources can be considered to be in the public domain and hence can be uploaded to the Cadiz University repository. In order to disseminate the results of the project’s usefulness in academia, lectures explaining its methodology, results and conclusions used will be given, not only in the same faculty but also at this International Conference to further its applications to other subjects