Abstract:

Facing unexpected critical events, such as the COVID-19 outbreak, can lead a whole society to make harsh changes in their habits and daily life. Several measures can be adopted to mitigate the effects of a pandemic. As an example, in Spain, forced confinement to home was approved by the government, paralyzing multiple business sectors and society in general. In the case of the University Carlos III of Madrid, we had to adapt to this whole new situation in record time, transforming lecture classrooms into online lectures as a general method of teaching for all subjects. This was done in a matter of days and with a minimum set of resources, as all professors and teaching assistants had to remain at home.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how to adapt resources already prepared for giving lectures in the classroom to resources for giving online lectures. The constraints are due to Spain´s state of alarm for the entire territory, implementing a lockdown that confines all citizens to their homes. These limitations are lack of resources, no support personnel for developing any teaching content, and the impossibility of acquiring physical devices. But the primary constraint was time available for this radical change of teaching.

The method explained in this paper has been applied to the second-year courses of Computer Science Engineering degree at Carlos III University of over 140 learners (half of them international students) from different nationalities that had to go back home immediately to their countries. Results show that the low-cost and minimum-time transformation process was applied successfully, and efficiently, allowing not just the generation of quality media support content, but also providing real-time guidance regardless of the distance or time zone.

Keywords:

Online teaching, low-cost resources, digital lectures, fast-time setup lectures, open-source software, social networks, messaging, online conferencing systems.