Abstract:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, face-to-face education was forced into online formats in the most colleges around the world without distinction of level. In Mexico, such disruption for the educative processes surprised to unaccustomed populations of students and teachers. Despite, private Higher Education was commonly the best prepared sector to afford such situation compared with Public Education and Basic Education, which became the most affected sectors under the Pandemic due to a deficient previous preparation and an inaccessible connection. This report discusses the emergent implementation of a digital and flexible model implemented in a private Higher Education institution for a Numerical Methods undergraduate course during the first emergent transition into the Covid-19 confinement. The complete strategy (methodology and digital tools) is first presented and then discussed evaluating their success and weakness in terms of the learning impact. By using approaches as blended learning, flipping the classroom and research-based activities, the students were prompted to accomplish preliminary activities, then, during video-conference sessions, individual and collaborative work was developed aside the professor’s exposition under active learning approach. After the session, homework and quizzes were assigned to follow the students’ learning, which was tracked in detail. Besides, a research-based project was accomplished to close the course. On the other hand, the use of diverse apps to keep professor-students and student-student contact is also discussed. In addition, we also depict the design of exams and activities to prevent academic faults. Finally, we compare the students’ performance within this model against one previous carried out before the pandemic under a face-to-face traditional approach to assess the effectiveness, the outstanding outcomes, together with some issues to improve future similar implementations.

Keywords:

Covid-19, Blended learning, Active learning, Flipping classroom, Mathematics, Educative apps.