Abstract:

As we are all aware, during last year, all over the world, educational institutions were confronted with the confinement caused by the pandemic crisis of COVID19. Due to this, academic activities were provided mostly by distance learning solutions. The transition, in an emergency regime, from mostly face-to-face education to distance learning (EaD) raised some challenges, namely regarding technical, pedagogical and organizational issues, but also constraints in what concerns integration, online class methodologies, tutoring and assessment of students. Therefore, in a context of development and expansion of an increasingly digital society, training in competencies within the scope of digital literacy of higher education teachers should be essential. In this text we share the pedagogical training plan for the first semester of 2020-2021 carried out by the e-learning and Pedagogical Innovation Unit, considering the interests expressed by the teachers of the different schools of P.PORTO, Portugal, to overcome the transition from face-to-face education to distance learning. The data from this process are the result of an action research methodology which seeks transformative change through simultaneous processes of taking action and doing research to, in this case, be able to help teachers in teaching practice. The data was collected using online sessions through webinars and synchronous e-workshops, with the asynchronous support of the Virtual Teachers Room, a space created in the MOODLE Learning management system , where the materials of the sessions and their recordings were shared, as well as forums, resource libraries and FAQ. In addition to teachers support, whenever they requested it through Moodle, Microsoft Teams, Whatsapp or even by email or phone, we carried out ten training courses in areas such as:
i) Online Assessment;
ii) Tutorial and online communication;
iii) Advanced MOODLE Training;
iv) Pedagogical Relationship and Communication;
v)Teaching and learning methodologies that enhance group work in the classroom;
vi) Authoring tools for e-Learning;
vii) Didactics and Gamification;
viii) Digital Tools to Support Formative vs Summative Evaluation;
ix) Cybersecurity;
X) Project-based learning.

To evaluate all the training plan we asked to all the participants to answer some questions through a survey created to that purpose which was tested previously. The results show that teachers valued the work done in the different sessions considering it very positive and formative for their professional work as teachers and researchers. The results also show that having support provided by the e-learning unit helps and answer to some of their pedagogical and technical difficulties, improves performance, contributes to understand the pedagogical relationship with students as well as to value collaborative work since they contact with different colleagues with same problems to solve.

Keywords:

EaD, Teaching, Pedagogy, Training, Assessment, Pandemic context.