Abstract:

The first case of COVID-19 was confirmed on 29th February 2020 in Ecuador. Shortly after, due to the outbreak, the government imposed strict quarantine conditions issuing the Executive Order No. 1017 in March. Some of the restrictive measures were physical distancing, lockdown, closure of the educational facilities, and the commencement of telecommuting.
Adapting the traditional face-to-face teaching method to the online learning modality posed some challenges at all levels of education, mainly for the public higher education institutions since their resources are limited. The university's authorities of Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL), agreed on April not to stop its educational activities. In this line, the first academic term was arranged to be in a full-online mode. Hence, one of the main challenges and concerns amongst the teaching staff and students was the limited access to the laboratories and field trips. This article aims to present: (i) the management for the construction of the virtual laboratories of the Faculty of Engineering in Earth Sciences (FICT) of ESPOL and (ii) the results of the design, implementation, and validation of the virtual laboratories (VL).
Six laboratories related to the degrees of Civil, Mining, Geology, and Petroleum engineering were virtualized using the digital platform “CoSpaces Edu” and the Learning Management System (LMS) of ESPOL. This initiative was part of the project, namely "Field testing virtual reality laboratory of tunneling and rock mechanics (GeoVirtual-COURSE)", whereby ESPOL collaborated with other universities.
Virtual education demanded that the laboratory technicians adapted their work conditions while telecommuting. From the beginning of the quarantine, they have been working on the VR spaces that included gathering base information, learning of a block-based programming method, being assessed by experts, and improving of their organizational, creativity and programming skills. All of these to bring about high-quality educational material. Although harsh conditions due to the outbreak, there was significant progress (53-62%) in the creation of the virtual tours and the virtual lab experiments after the first couple of months of homeworking. This is indicative of resilience, commitment, and motivation achieved by the teamwork support.
At the moment, 15 virtual lab tours and 60 virtual experiments are available as a teaching resource for 28 courses in the FICT. The average time for the technicians to reach an intermediate-advance level of expertise using the digital platform was 80 h, from which half of this time was devoted to creating the virtual tours and the remaining to polish the virtual practices. The level of satisfaction was ranked between 8 to 10 by the 51% of the students and 77% of the academics, using a scale ranging from 1 (Lowest) to 10 (highest). Future work will concentrate on using the feedback of the users (students and academics) to improve the virtual lab practices.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the adaptability of an academic team of higher education was tested. The biggest challenge was developing the necessary skills to build the virtual learning environments and to deliver a redesigned content of the laboratory courses while assuring an excellent quality for the online education process.

Keywords:

COVID-19, management, virtual laboratory, virtual reality, adaptability, earth sciences