Abstract:

After the appearance of COVID-19, which has changed our lives, all professionals’ routines are no longer the same. In all countries regulations and decisions were imposed to prevent and control this coronavirus.

The higher education has undergone various changes in the teaching mode which, consequently, had repercussions on the way to assess students. The change of education mode brought problems, such as students’ difficult in focusing, teachers not familiar with remote teaching, among others.

Both authors of this paper are teachers of higher education and for us it was a challenge since we never have used any distance teaching model. Our professional experience was always face-to-face teaching and we had to adapt to the new way of teaching, also changing the way of evaluating our students.
One of the elements of the final evaluation of our students was the weekly delivery via email to the teachers of the proposed exercises resolution related to the syllabus taught every week. It was the perfect opportunity to find out what they had really learned and what difficulties they had experienced. It was also the way to keep them focused and following the Curricular Unit.

In this work we intend to share some individual resolutions of our students of higher education we faced as their teachers. As we have mentioned before, such works were part of the assessment of a curricular unit “Linear Algebra” of the 1st year / 2nd semester of the Communication and Multimedia course of a public higher institution in North of Portugal. Note that such Curricular Unit belongs to the area of mathematics and most of these students have difficulties with this type of topics.

The semester began on February 2020 and the terminus was in the end of June during the Academic Year 2019-2020. Note that until the middle of March we had face-to-face teaching, with two hours of Theoretical classes and two hours of Practical classes per week. From the middle of March, the face-to-face teaching was no longer possible, having to move to teaching adapted to the remote teaching. We did not go back to face-to-face until the end of the semester and we share some works provided from this period.

After we start with remote teaching, we ask all the students to send us by email scans/photos with their resolutions resulting from exercises that were proposed every week.

Almost all students send such resolutions and we are surprised with some of them, because we had several right and complete resolutions and those that were not correct always received feedback from teachers, explaining why their resolution is not correct or not completely correct. We have been in permanent remote contact with our students and we think that the delivery of these resolutions has made the students remain aware of the syllabus in such a way that the final results obtained in this Curricular Unit demonstrate that most of the students obtained a positive result.

Keywords:

Covid-19, remote teaching, assessment, higher education.