Under the curriculum of Chemistry Sciences, the students have a subject of Chemical Engineering. The general opinion about this subject is that it should be as practical as possible: i.e., the students should be able, at the end of the semester, to understand the most important techniques to solve applied problems of the main fields typical of chemical engineering. The previous experience indicates that if the teacher gives an important number of problems to the students, only a scarce number of them try to solve them on a continuous work along the semester.
It is therefore necessary to encourage the students to do such work and the most efficient way is, probably, to tell them that this continuous work will be evaluated along the semester and have an important contribution on their final mark. Of course, if about 60 students are working hard on chemical engineering problems every week, the teacher will have to work even harder to correct each problem, evaluate the work and indicate each student his errors. In fact, as long as the teachers have each week about 8 h of teaching with groups of more than 50 students, it is almost impossible to perform a personalized track of each student’s work.
This situation comes together with two additional circumstances: first, our students are getting every day more used the Communication and Information Technologies to communicate between then, and second, along the student’s University Education their skills to use computer calculation tools, present their results with computer-aided graphics and elaborate neat documents and presentations should be promoted.
We have used the tools that the University of Malaga makes available under the Moodle Platform of the “Campus Virtual” to overcome the first problem while taking advantage of the two additional circumstances mentioned above. The main tool is the use of Workshops: The Workshop begins as a typical Chemical Engineering problem that the student must try to solve for a week. Then the students sent all the solutions to the platform, which redistribute each of the received problems anonymously among them so they now have to perform a second task. This one consists mainly on a constructive criticism and evaluation of the problem(s) they received. On a third stage, the teaching team publishes a solution for the problem. About 15 workshops were performed during the semester, with an approximate duration of 2 weeks each. During the workshop, the students used the Forums to ask the group about specific difficulties that they were meeting during their attempt to solve the problem. The forums arose frequently some interesting discussions that helped the teaching team to discover where the students found the main difficulties. In another paper presented to ICERI 2008 we present an internal evaluation of these innovations.