Abstract:

Efforts to contain Covid-19 crisis, based on social isolation and mobility restrictions, has required significant adjustments in every aspect of our lives. The pandemic affected global education systems, by promoting the unprecedented and rapid migration to remote learning. The shift to online education claimed a reflection about the traditional teaching, and an adaptation of learning activities. Distinct teaching styles and technological structures emerged in higher education systems, for instance, pre-recorded lectures, question-and-answer sessions, and quizzes for self-assessment. The adaptation to meet online demands is specially challenging in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) areas. STEM education demands the purposeful integration of disciplines in solving real‐world problems, in order to create critical thinkers and innovators to deal with changing situations in an interconnected world.

Bloom’s taxonomy is a framework that supports learning, being a sound basis to guide the creation or improvement of courses. Bloom’s taxonomy is in fact a classification of learning objectives. It establishes levels of learning structured as a pyramid and explains what learners should achieve in each level. The framework introduces each category, providing directives about how to accomplish it one. The idea is that learners should start in the lowest level and move to higher levels of thinking, always acquiring the expertise related to each level. Undergrad professors and graduate instructors have been applying Bloom’s taxonomy for planning course or curriculum, setting learning goals, creating learning activities, and defining evaluations.

In this paper, we present the structure of a course offered virtually in an Engineering institute. Aiming to solve numerical problems, students should develop the mathematical background related to the numerical methods, and learn how to implement such methods using Matlab programming. The traditional course had face-to-face classes and programming laboratories (labs). Considering the remote demands, the course was redesigned using Bloom’s taxonomy to define learning objectives. We created pre-recorded lessons and maintained the labs, but we added quizzes to better support students in the learning process. The idea was to have quizzes to aid the initial levels of Bloom’s hierarchy, while labs could go beyond and reach the higher levels.

Here we explain the main characteristics of the developed quizzes, and we show the students’ feedback about the effectiveness of quizzes. We also discuss how quizzes and labs contribute to achieve each Bloom’s level and their related learning objectives. The present work encourages educators to design courses based on Bloom’s taxonomy. The learning objectives here indicated are a suitable guidance for establishing directives to a course with mathematical and programming requirements. The introduction of quizzes in our course, as well as the combination of quizzes and labs in a complementary way, was an interesting approach to support learning constructively during the remote scenario imposed by the pandemic. Based on our experience, practitioners can apply similar strategies and create new ones, in a way to prepare online and hybrid courses that gained a notorious importance recently and that may remain as an interesting alternative for education from now on.

Keywords:

Higher education, COVID-19, online classes, course design.