Abstract:

Nowadays, we are living in a revolution where digital and decentralized training has grown tremendously since the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Changes in student expectations have evolved in search of more accessible online and hybrid access to training where multimodal interaction is increasingly important and necessary.

This paradigm shift has made it possible to verify that the coexistence of the two best-known training models that until now seemed irreconcilable and that were considered two parallel options in learning is possible.

Traditional methods of evaluating the user's perception and experience before, during, and after a learning process are insufficient if one wants to analyse the emotional aspects of the student's subconscious. The human mind contains conscious and unconscious thoughts, cultural prejudices, traditional learning patterns, preconceived ideas, etc. That all lead to emotional responses that come from the subconscious. The mental construct influences decision-making or motivation when wanting to learn something, improve knowledge of a subject, or aspire to a better position.

The motivation to learn something concrete is even more important than the functional one. Long-life learning generates associations of knowledge, experiences, and emotions caused by the stimuli we receive and that we transform into part of our deepest knowledge. Implicit perception evaluation techniques allow an analysis of the training before and after receiving it. In particular, priming is a technique that can add significant value to this process, and that is hardly used in the design of services and even less so in the design of educational services.

The article presents the experience in a postgraduate course, Strategic Thinking and Global Management for entrepreneurs, at the Universidad Ean, Colombia, in 2018. This experience was aimed at knowing and analyzing five attributes through the semantic priming technique: quality, comfort, technology, innovative, and flexibility, associated with two types of face-to-face and online learning. This implicit response technique measures the unconscious response time differential in milliseconds to assess the association of these attributes with the face-to-face and online categories. The test was carried out with 23 students and the statistical results show a strong perception of these attributes related to the type of learning.

Keywords:

Higher Education, online training, semantic priming, implicit response techniques.