Abstract:

The Covid-19 pandemia, suffered from the beginning of 2020, forced University Community to carry out a transformation of the teaching methodologies, based so far on face-to-face teaching and considering the new obvious requirement of the online courses. All this transformation had to be undertaken with great haste, being a huge challenge for general services, teachers and students. Likewise, once the state of alarm had ended, an important objective was also to guarantee hygienic conditions during the 2020-2021 academic year at the face-to-face modality, as well as the adequacy and sanitary security of the university spaces with the highest occupancy.
Ignorance and novelty in this new context, caused by the lack of previous references in the action protocols, forced Universities the establishment of measures to be taken based on the general indications published by the Ministry of Health, which were reduced to a Guide of good practices. Express recommendations were imposed, in order to adapt the imminent academic year considering an adapted presenciality and establishing basic hygiene prevention measures, generalized for university centers, as well as action measures in case of suspicion or positive case in Covid- 19.
In the specific case of Region of Murcia, all the universities of its so-called Autonomous Community signed a joint agreement UCAM-UMU-UPCT, establishing the basic and emergency measures after several meetings held before the start of the course with the Higher Department of Universities. Shortly after, UCAM Occupational Risk Prevention Service and its UCAM Covid-19 Committee, created a Prevention Plan aimed at guaranteeing safety on the Murcia campus which was activated on September 15, 2020.
Once these measures were established, a group of researchers, made up of architects and building engineers, carried out a SWOT analysis to establish the main strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, derived from the new context, implementing an exhaustive analysis of the adopted measures in order to, later on, making the appropriate improvement proposals.
The results of the SWOT analysis were exposed at the UCAM-UME Technical Conference, held on September 30, 2020 at UCAM. The Military Emergency Unit (UME) had an active participation in this conference through one of the outstanding lectures, the one of Commander Luis A. Rodríguez Álvarez de Lara, Head of the Staff of the Group for Intervention in Technological and Environmental Emergencies (GIETMA). His presentation provided an extensive knowledge to the research group, regarding many military tasks implemented by the Military Emergencies Unit because of Covid -19, and exposing several study cases as the protocol created for the adaptation and disinfection of residences for the elderly.
A final debate was useful to detect possible deficiencies about the adopted measures, in what concerns to university spaces technical and design measures, particularly based on UCAM campus, where at the time were proposing improvements about hygiene protocols, which could be implemented step by step, ensuring that the course has successfully passed to the face-to-face modality.
The 20-21 academic year´s experience serves as a pilot experience which helps to establish new measures to be implemented in the future, taking into account that social relations habits -both inside and outside the classroom- will remain restricted for a long time, either due to new COVID infection increases, as well as possible future health crises of another nature.

Keywords:

Adaptation of university spaces, disinfection of university spaces, Covid-19, safety in the face-to-face teaching modality, well-being of students and teachers.