Blended learning labs practice: magnetic field measurement

Abstract

In the current academic year, the widespread implementation of the new degrees in the Spanish higher education has brought the development and application of new methodologies with the aim of trying to improve the way students learn. In order to promote scientific interest of the students and to help in the improvement of the teaching-learning process of physics, we have scheduled plan blended learning labs. A lab practice that deals with magnetic fields, whose concepts have been already discussed in theoretical sessions, is proposed to students. They have to prepare and develop this practice by themselves. In order to assist students in this phase, a web page indicating those previous steps has been developed using the eLearning XHTML editor (eXe). It is an a freely available Open Source authoring application to assist teachers and academics in the design, development and publishing of web-based learning and teaching materials without the need to become proficient in HTML or complicated web-publishing applications. Once this phase is finished, students proceed to the assembly and conduct of the session and, finally, they make a public presentation of the results. Although time and resources has been limited (first quarter of current year and just one practice), results have been very encouraging. We have performed test understanding of concepts studied, resulting in a significant improvement compared to usual method of working within laboratories. Also, is detected as remarkable fact that the students observed conjunction between the theoretical and practical lectures.