Abstract:

There are numerous studies in the field of Remote Learning dealing with the impact of a careful instructional design on the learning results, adapted to the degree, student maturity, student-instructor ratio, learning pace, etc.

However, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, educators where forced to migrate their activities from classrooms to virtual environments within days. This shift is by definition an Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) action: rather than been a planned change from Face-to-Face to Remote Teaching, it was a crisis-driven temporary shift to an alternate teaching mode, which allowed the students to continue with their education under unexpected adverse circumstances.

ERT is regarded as a discipline by itself, with its own peculiarities and challenges, mostly related with its temporary nature and with the need to adapt the teaching experience to eventual poor access to technological tools, such as intermittent internet availability:

- It aims to provide as much learning continuity as possible while the emergency condition persists, allowing to revert the teaching, at any time, back into Face-to-Face mode. Therefore, both in-class and remote programs should be compatible and are expected to be taught at the same pace.
- As some students could experience difficulties in the access to the Internet or even to a computer, an ERT action should be flexible enough to provide them with materials and activities adapted to those personal circumstances. Thus, teachers could end up overloaded with content edition tasks.
- In addition, during emergency alerts, students might be specially stressed, or face personal health concerns that may easily distract them from their learning tasks. Hence, ERT should focus on creative solutions to keep students interest and motivation.

In this paper we present our experience on an ERT action performed during COVID-19 sanitary crisis at a first year module in Telecommunication Engineering Degree at the University of Malaga. Our previous experience on Live Lecture Screencast (LLS) recording, presented at EDULEARN’19, led us to the use of video creation procedures to overcome the inherent ERT challenges. Online LLS sessions were effortlessly recorded and used as complementary Offline material. Students with stable Internet connection were able to take advantage of the synchronous Online Lectures attendance, while those experiencing connection troubles, were still able to follow the same material asynchronously, at their own pace.

We focused on the following educational goals:

i) Re-using as much classroom-ready material as possible.
ii) Spicing up our presentations with dynamic contents, more suitable to the virtual environment, but still avoiding an extra work load over the teachers.
iii) Encouraging students’ active participation during online sessions.
iv) Capturing Online Lectures and making them available as Offline Video Lectures, with a minimum edition and post-processing effort.

As a result of this experience, we are proud to asses that our students kept a high level of attendance during the sanitary crisis and subsequent three months long lockdown in Spain. Furthermore, most of our students succeeded their final tests, showing a high level of theoretical and applied knowledge.

Keywords:

Emergency Remote Learning, Live Lecture Screencast, Sanitary Crisis, Teaching Experience, Synchronous and Asynchronous Teaching, Digital Skills.