Abstract:

On March 11th 2020, an unexpected situation abruptly began. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak a global pandemic. In-person class had to be abandoned and teaching was reinvented moving onto online learning. Due to this new situation the communication between teachers and students was limited to an online platform. In the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) the application used was Microsoft Teams.

Not knowing the true potential of this application, we finally managed to host the first meeting with the students, after long hours of trial and error. The effort was tremendous, and knowledge sharing among teachers was essential. During the first weekend in March, teams were created, and instructions were sent by email so that all of us, students and teachers, were ready and prepared for the first online class meeting.

During the first online lecture, the theory of connections in steel structures was successfully taught, thanks to the use of a high quality presentation that included relevant images. Even though it seemed a success from a formal point of view, something essential was missing: the student-teacher communication was not as good as expected. All in all, the new environment, the inability to see the students face to face and, the impossibility of in-person interactions, made the success of the class doubtful.

In an engineering class a chalkboard is a must. In record time we learned to operate virtual whiteboards with high-performance pointers. These pointers made writing mathematical expressions and graphical explanations possible without limitations, and therefore the more hands-on classes were taught with quality. However, there was still a lack of student-teacher interaction.

One of the major drawbacks of distance learning occurred when it came to conducting exams. We had to adapt the in-person assessments (numerical calculations and problem-solving) to a digital format and try to guarantee the integrity of the evaluation process. Students had all kinds of tools at their fingertips and the ability to cheat was just a click away. A large number of people and companies were offering to fraudulently take online tests on your behalf. This is the reason why professors decided to record test sessions using a variety of methods. Engineering professors at the Higher Technical School of Agricultural Engineering of Ciudad Real (ETSIA-CR) used customised exams, using different numbers but assessing the same concepts. This work shows the data analysis of online test results compared to those obtained in previous years while in-person learning, both being very similar.

Keywords:

On-line learning, customised examinations, technology education