Abstract:

This work describes the experience of using the different available tools for virtual teaching provided by the University of Granada (UGR) during the COVID-19 outbreak confinement in the “Nutrition and Health” (N&H) subject from the Bachelor's Degree in Physiotherapy (Melilla Campus).

The UGR is a public University with three different campuses: Granada (Andalusia), Ceuta and Melilla (North Africa). Despite the UGR offers some online degree and master programmes, the face-to-face teaching modality predominates. For that reason, no one was prepared to adapt all face-to-face teaching to a 100% virtual mode in just a few days. Since the “State of Alarm” due to the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in Spain on 14th March 2020, the UGR directed all its efforts to adapt the continuity of teaching quality and ensure the best learning for the students in a virtual mode. From the very beginning the UGR created a COVID-19 Action Plan webpage (https://covid19.ugr.es/index.php/) and all the course guides were adapted to that exceptional situation.

Under these circumstances, the official teaching platform of the University of Granada “Teaching Support Resource Platform” (PRADO) has been the most employed resource. This platform has become the basis of online teaching during confinement, allowing to upload and organize topics, videos and activities, create questionnaires, take the register, create blogs and wikis and, of course, evaluate the students, among other features. However, the high volume of students collapsed the platform several times, especially during the midterm exams. To solve that problem, the “Resource Production Centre for the Digital University” (CEPRUD) created a new platform called “PRADO Exams” which is a virtual platform optimized for a high volume of students can take exams simultaneously through questionnaires, considerably speeding up platform response times.

The Zoom-based Centralized Video Conferencing Services (SALVE UGR), with capacity up to 300 participants was preferred for the online N&H lectures. The students enrolled in N&H ensured that this system was easier to use and with higher quality visual presentations than other resources such as Google Meet. Nevertheless, for collective or individual tutoring, Google Meet was employed because, unlike the previous one, it does not require to reserve previously.

This forced distance teaching and learning has been a challenge for, both, university professors and students. The confinement has compelled the university professors to moving their teaching and assessment online, working from home and, in most cases, spending endless hours to adapt to the new situation without compromising the quality of teaching. On their behalf, the students found more difficulties concentrating in class and studying in a different environment than usual. Additionally, in spite of being immersed in a digital world and being using the PRADO platform from the beginning of the course, they also found some difficulties to adapt to all the online resources proposed. Even though the situation has been complicated, there is no doubt that all efforts were worth it and that the UGR is more prepared than ever to face the challenging, changing educational landscape.

Keywords:

COVID-19, Online education, Institutional strategies, Online resources, University of Granada.