In recent years, a great development of online teaching has been taking place in universities. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted this new reality in teaching. The university system faced a great challenge, in which it had to adapt very quickly to this new situation, which forced universities and specifically the University of Jaen (UJA), to move from a fundamentally face-to-face teaching to a remote teaching, both online and blended learning. To this end, the University of Jaén equipped the theory classrooms with videoconferencing systems, which until then had been reserved only for some specific classes.

As for the teaching of laboratory practices, the problem was more complex. At UJA, Engineering degrees have an experimentality of 20 students per group. According to the approved regulation “Plan of prevention, protection and surveillance COVID 2019 of the UJA: Departmental buildings type II”, it was reduced to 12 students per classroom group, with remote monitoring of the rest of the students. For this purpose, as in the case of the teaching classrooms, the different laboratories were equipped with fixed video cameras. The results were not very satisfactory, since the knowledge acquired through the use and handling of laboratory equipment is hardly comparable to its substitution simply by viewing images. Part of this problem is due to the technical limitations of the systems used, since the cameras installed only covered a certain radius of vision, which did not allow capturing the detail of the concepts developed theoretically on the blackboard before the development of the practice. This fact was aggravated at the time of the practice, since it was totally impossible to capture the characteristics of the large equipment used in the subjects related to the concentration of minerals and rocks.

Under these circumstances, during the course 2019-2020 in the Interuniversity Master of Mining Engineering, which is taught between the Universities of Jaén, Huelva and Córdoba, it was planned for the subject “Processes and Treatment Plants of Minerals and Industrial Rocks”, the live broadcasting of the practical laboratory classes to the students of the three sites, using in this case a portable camera. The result obtained was acceptable, given the circumstances, and improved the results obtained previously with the use of fixed cameras, although there was no recorded record of the practical sessions carried out for later use.

For all this, and in view of the incipient increase in blended and virtual teaching, the usefulness of having a video material developed as a complementary teaching tool for the laboratory practices of this subject, where all the equipment used in a Flow-sheet of gravimetry and flotation of minerals and rocks is contemplated, was verified.

In addition, it is also a response to the teaching needs of a part of the students enrolled in this degree, formed by graduates of the Degree of Mining Engineering, who are working and whose schedules often prevent them from attending in person to the theoretical classes and especially to the practices.

Keywords: Videographic material, Laboratory practices, Flow-sheet, Mining engineering.