Abstract:

The impact of the COVID19 pandemic on higher education has been especially noticeable in countries like Spain, where the transition from the previous learning framework to a completely virtual scheme took place in a few days, as a consequence of the unprecedented national confinement regulations of March 2020. This abrupt change forced Spanish universities to adopt specific regulations to modify all the aspects of the learning process, from learning and teaching to assessment, in order to seamlessly transit to a completely virtual system.

In this paper, we analyze, from the point of view of the students, the results of the transition to a completely virtual mode during the 2010-2020 second semester in the MSc in Actuarial Science at the University of Málaga.

The switch to a completely virtual scheme in the University of Málaga had two phases:
(i) a 18-days temporal adaptation on March,13rd which coincided with the first confinement regulation of March, 14th, and, after that,
(ii) a ultimate decision on April, 1st to continue with the remote learning for the rest of the 2019-2020 course (common to all the universities in the Andalusia region, including University of Málaga).

The MSc in Actuarial Science at the University of Málaga is a two-year post-graduate study program based on a face-to-face structure, although it is complemented by a virtual learning environment, available to all the study programs as the University of Málaga. Therefore, our students are already using some online resources, but heavily rely on the face-to-face contact with lecturers and class-mates in their learning process.

In order to assess the perceptions of our students of several aspects of the transition to a remote learning scheme, we conducted a survey in July 2020, that includes questions about their preferences regarding learning modes, their perception of the advantages and disadvantages of the virtual scheme adopted, workloads, assessment systems, and their academics results after the COVID19 outbreak.

The main results of the survey indicate that most of our students felt that their academic results were not inferior compared to those expected in a normal situation, that their lecturers did a good job facilitating the adaptation to the virtual learning system, and that the information received -regarding assessment and other aspects- was adequate. In contrast, we also found that the workload was perceived as higher than the expected in a face-to-face system and that the learning process was slowed down compared to the first semester.

Keywords:

Actuarial, COVID19, e-learning.