Abstract:

The emergence of the COVID pandemic during the 2019/2020 academic year has had a generalized impact on the teaching and learning process within higher education, also significantly altering all aspects related to the student evaluation process. However, this adaptive process in such a rapid period also supposes, as well as a challenge, an opportunity to understand, modify and improve the teaching, learning and assessment process. All this from the knowledge of the motivation and initiative of the students in situations as extraordinary as the pandemic.

In this work, the main observations obtained in the development of the Materials Technology subject at the University of Jaén (Spain) are exposed. This core subject is taught in the 3rd year of the degree in Mechanical Engineering, of the double degrees of this last degree with Electrical Engineering, Industrial Electronic Engineering and Industrial Organization Engineering and of the Master in Industrial Engineering.

In a 100 % virtual scenario of teaching and evaluating the subject, the weight of the exam in the students' final grade was reduced from 80 to 50%. This fact led to the realization of research work on materials for application in different technological facets. The students were free to select the theme of this investigation among 4 alternatives offered by the teacher or propose a new topic of interest.

With a sample of 55 students who carried out this work, the statistical study of the evaluation of these works has allowed the following main observations to be quantified:
- 29% of the students opted for a free theme. When analyzing whether there is an influence of gender in this percentage, conclusive observations have not been drawn since the population of female students is low (only 9 of the papers presented) in line with other STEM degrees.
- In the case of the topics of free choice, there was a wide diversity of subjects that are difficult to group. Even so, it has been possible to establish a link between works related to 3D printing (5% of papers) and those that address different aspects of the transport sector, mainly automotive and aeronautics (9% of works).
- Within the works with a free-choice theme, there were only two papers related to the coronavirus pandemic.

In view of the previous results, it can therefore be concluded that the degree of initiative of the students when facing the new evaluation model was scarce or, at best, moderately significant. On the other hand, the omnipresent theme of the pandemic has not become, at first, a source of motivation. Thus, the pandemic is not seen by students as an opportunity to carry out their future professional work as engineers with knowledge of materials.

Keywords:

Materials teaching, Evaluation, Students initiative, Motivation, Covid19 pandemic.