Abstract:

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many educational institutions around the world have been put in the need of digitizing many classes, moving them to a virtual space. At the Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL), the Faculty of Engineering in Earth Sciences (FICT) has carried out this virtualization process with the laboratory classes within its academic offerings in civil, geology, mining, and petroleum engineering. However, with the lack of instructional audiovisual material for this new environment, some difficulties have been witnessed between lecturers and students. Consequently, the importance of creating a link between the platform and the user is reflected, where the instructions to be followed for this new educational environment are adequately explained, as well as serving as support material for professors.

This proposal arises from the satisfaction results expressed by the students from surveys, where it was observed that only 67% are satisfied with the instructional design and among the main disadvantages are the structure (51%), application design (41 %), which does not capture attention (37%).

This work aims to show the contribution of digital tools and the development of audiovisual content, bringing virtual education closer to students and educational institutions.

For this reason, six laboratories of FICT were involved in the process of the present work. Audiovisual capsules were made for each laboratory, which are divided in: a small promotional capsule and an instructional capsule of approximately one minute thirty seconds and two minutes forty-five seconds, respectively, giving a total of six promotional and six instructive audiovisual capsules. First, the viewer is introduced to the content of the virtual laboratories by the promotional capsules without giving detailed explanations. Secondly, this is complemented by the instructional capsules, where the guidelines of these environments are explained in more detail. With the elaborated products, a monitory satisfaction survey shows that the acceptance of this audiovisual material by the lecturers and students is high since the transmission of the information occurs effectively and dynamically.

Keywords:

Audiovisual material, capsules, virtual laboratories.