YOUTUBE AS A COMPLEMENTARY LEARNING TOOL TO SUPPORT THE STUDY IN THE FIELD OF THERMAL ENGINEERING

In recent years the use of Web 2.0 applications, including YouTube, wikis, social networks, blogs, etc. has spread to all areas, including higher education. Among these applications, YouTube is the most used in the educational field, being highly appreciated by university students. Currently, YouTube has more than 1,900 million users, and it is estimated that more than 1,000 million daily hours worldwide are spent watching Youtube videos, which are mainly accessed from mobile devices. Almost all universities have an institutional channel on YouTube in which in addition to disseminating the corporate image and their teaching and research activities, some teaching videos used in degree studies and Massive Open Line Courses (MOOC) are included. This paper presents the main activities carried out in a teaching innovation project financed by the University of Zaragoza (UZ, Spain) for the development and management of a YouTube channel which has been designed as a repository of instructional videos. This video collection together with a set of short self-assessment questionnaires has been used to support teaching in several related subjects in the field of Thermodynamics and Thermal Engineering. The paper aims to analyse the visualization statistics of the videos by using YouTube and Moodle Analytics, as well as the degree of satisfaction of the students with this innovation experience through a questionnaire. Likewise, the possible improvements obtained in the teaching-learning process are analysed and possible advantages or disadvantages associated with the use of videos as a complementary tool to traditional teaching are identified. The results show a high satisfaction degree among students with the videos produced and the selfassessment questionnaires as well as an improvement in the learning outcomes.