Challenges and Perspectives

In Europe, universities and particularly colleges of Biology and other Natural History sciences, are facing a critical and tense situation as a consequence of implementation of the European Space for Higher Teaching Education. This scenario should be seen not as a problem but instead it should be perceived as an opportunity to initiate gradual and deep changes (to evolve!) in our current teaching methodologies towards new teaching standars more focussed on the formation of the student

It is a priority that all the efforts of university instructors while trying to improve and innovate their teaching techniques could also lead to the formation of teaching teams that may give adequate answers to the current needs in education of the students of our universities. To help in this task, we should promote forums to present and discuss our experiences in teaching innovation in different areas such as creation of educational resources using TIC (virtual platforms, wikis, etc), motivational techniques, development of corporate learning or based in team work, or problem-based learning.

On the other hand, this congress aims to catalyze the interest of university teachers for the innovation and research in teaching these Natural History courses. Often, the change and scientific content of these disciplines, obscures the need to renew and innovate also in teaching protocols. Nevertheless, we believe that innovation is as important in teaching as it is to conduct high level research.