Abstract:

University education programs require the modernization of teaching systems to adapt them to the complex needs of designing the best solutions for the problems arisen by our very rapidly changing urban spaces. Training students and their teachers to do so, is one of the challenges of this “Erasmus + KA203 - Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education” project: “GLOCAL-Innovation future engineers' training for contemporary city's problems” (2019-1-PL01-KA203-065654).

Sometimes the interest for using new technologies can make us forget the purpose that makes them useful or necessary for a given task. This has not been the case with the blended learning system, developed by the three European universities collaborating in GLOCAL project: Politechnika Bialostocka / Bialystok University of Technology (BUT), from Poland, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), from Spain and Klaipedos Valstybine Kolegija / Klaipeda State University of Applied Sciences (KVK), from Lithuania. Some of the possibilities internet related technologies can offer, might make it easier to connect students from different countries. This was the reason why they were included as a part of the methodology that was considered in this project, both traditional and new, as well as internationally integrated. This paper will analyse how E-learning have been used in GLOCAL project, its connection with face-to-face classes, as well as some unexpected results, related with Covid-19 experiences.

Summer schools are one of the most important activities considered in this project for innovation of education. In both GLOCAL 1 and GLOCAL 2 Summer Schools, 24 students are forming groups, one from each country, to work on a problem set for them, in this case, developing a bus stop shelter. The frame for it consists of 2 face-to-face courses, (2 weeks in Poland or Lithuania and 2 weeks in Spain) and a 3-week e-learning part, as it was explained in the project and in a previous paper with its First results [1]. This e-learning part, set between the other two, has been developed using both UPM-Moodle, under the supervision of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM, Spain), and BUT-Teams, created by Bialystok University of Technology (BUT, Poland). UPM-Moodle platform has been the main tool for on-line lectures and course materials by teachers from the three universities, while BUT-Teams was used for on-line meetings of the international students’ teams and collaborative work, both for assignments and for developing their bus stop shelter projects.

New conditions of the project realisation, related to Covid-19 pandemic, extended its blended form, with on-line lectures realised on Zoom platform (organised by UPM). Teachers experience and results of internal Glocal survey (2020) confirmed that on-line form can be very useful for lecture delivering.

Unexpected results, in relation with what was planned previously in the project, were the knowledge of these e-learning platforms, both by students and teachers, developed under the Covid-19 pandemic confinement. But also a lack of motivation towards using them, that might also be related to other causes, as it will be explained in the paper.

References:
[1] D. Gawryluk, M.A. Flórez de la Colina, D. Krawczyk, P.C. Izquierdo Gracia, D. Jankauskienė, E. Brezgyté (2020) Understanding the problems of teaching future engineers to think globally and act locally: Glocal Project, ICERI2020 Proceedings, pp. 7249-7257.

Keywords:

e-learning Experiences, From Face-to-face to Remote Learning, STEM Education Experiences.