Abstract:

On March 13, 2020, the first quarantine came into force in Spain due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the educational sector, the government order was to suspend all face-to-face classes in schools, institutes, universities and other institutions, but without suspending teaching activities. This suspension finally lasted until July 31, 2020. At the Jaume I University (UJI) of Castellón, Spain, precisely on March 13, a period of one week of school holidays began due to the annual fair of Castellón. This had a double general impact: it gave us more time to prepare the conversion to distance classes, but, on the contrary, part of the teaching staff was on a leisure trip and out of reach of telematic means. In particular, in the Degree in Management and Public Administration (GAP), there was another additional impact: a considerable part of the subjects did not habitually use the support of the virtual classroom (AV) resource of the UJI and, therefore, were not prepared for a rapid transition to teaching in virtual sessions. On the other hand, the UJI president's team was developing regulations and guidelines on the march, following in the wake of the regulations of national and regional authorities in a period of great uncertainty for all levels of the UJI, including students.

This paper aims to describe the initial situation of GAP in terms of telematic resources, availability of teaching resources and technological preparation in ICT of teachers and students. We also want to present a summary of the proposals and solutions applied so that GAP teaching would have its viability assured, as well as the restrictions and collateral problems that arose, as well as the experience acquired that is being useful in the 2020/2021 academic year. Finally, the result of all the effort is summarized at the end of the 2019/2019 academic year, on July 31.

Happily, and thanks to the excellent collaboration of the students, all the degree courses ended in July 2020 without major incidents. The extraordinary teaching experience that has been acquired in this five-month period, between March and July, has been very useful for the design of the current 2020/2021 course, which maintains reduced presence combined with semi-presence.

Keywords:

Face-to-face teaching versus distance learning, Covid-19 educational impact, Strategies and rules, Degree in Management and Public Administration.