Abstract:

The Covid-19 pandemic has settled a hard test of our skills as educators. It has established a large-scale experiment in the world on online, mobile, and blended learning approaches slowly developed mainly in the last decade. It will be unforgivable not to track such experiences through the most accurate data being generated there. This work describes an introductory analysis in the use of learning analytics to gather information for a blended learning course in Numerical Methods for Higher Education under the sudden Covid-19 context. Learning analytics embedded in a previous Blended Learning design has provided valuable information and data to compare the impact of the elements included to deliver the class. Those analytics included access, evaluation, cooperation, attendance, use of online materials, among others. The daily tracking through the several activities, materials, and sessions let the analysis of the transition from the face-to-face scheme into the online one. Taking advantage of the deployment of the blended learning course already existent, such transition can be analysed as a multivariate process, identifying changes in the attendance, usage performance, behaviour, and style learning in the course. In addition to the learning performance impact, some valuable learning behaviours in the course have been detected departing from the analytics. Analytics has let a graphical following of the events and performances to compare the learning processes through the moving from the normal to the Covid-19 period, thus providing quantitative elements to assess the educative process.

Keywords:

Covid-19, Blended Learning, Numerical Methods, Educational Innovation, Higher education.