Abstract:

The impact of COVID-19 on higher education, and specially the inflection point that is its appearance, requires a thorough analysis of the efficiency and adequacy of measures taken to minimize its impact in achieving the previously set goals for several courses, and in particular for those in the syllabus defined during the academic year 2019-2020 for several university degrees.

In this work the focus is put on a quantitative subject with a significant load of informatics-related content, and imparted as a part of an official postgraduate studies program at the Universitat de València. This particular course found itself interrupted by the arrival of COVID-19 and, in view of the lack of available technological tools at the moment, forced the teaching staff to intensify their production of video tutorials through screen cap software, in order to help their students in the acquisition of the skills and competencies objective of the course. At the same time, the use of face-to-face presence requiring tools, such as Audience Response Systems (ARS), had to be halted.

Taking into account the use of the two aforementioned ICTs in previous promotions, a comparative study will be carried out to assess if the effectiveness of such tools, and the students’ perception of their impact on their own teaching-learning process, varied alongside the situation, i.e. before and after COVID-19.

An initial descriptive analysis suggests that the promotion affected by the new COVID-19 situation perceived video tutorials more favourably than the previous promotion in terms of how much they helped them assimilate the course concepts, but less positively with regards to the repercussion of this tool on group activities, although the number of visualizations required to understand them also decreased when compared to the pre-COVID-19 promotion. A more in-depth inferential analysis helps identifying the statistical significance of some of these differences, and discarding others.

Keywords:

Audience Response Systems, video tutorials, face-to-face learning, remote learning, inferential analysis.