Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated profound changes in all areas of society, including educational activity. Education had already been undergoing changes in recent decades, as a result of technological and global advances, and there was a growing social demand for hybrid, mixed or virtual learning environments that would respond to the needs for flexibility and innovation in access to higher education. With the emergence of COVID-19, these demands required an even more immediate and expert response from educational institutions.

In this scenario, online universities, due to their accumulated experience, are taking more and more prominence. The OBS Business School, already in 2017 estimated that in subsequent years a 50% of higher education would be taught online.

The reasons that explain this increase are:
a) the ease of combining training, professional and personal life;
b) its global and delocalized nature;
c) the possibility of developing different types of learning: learning by doing; learning by interacting and learning by sharing.

In the current context, these reasons acquire a special meaning and pose (new) challenges for universities that wish to successfully adapt to social demands and requirements.

This research focuses on an online university, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and, more specifically, on the Practicum of the Degree in Psychology. The context indicated, with the irruption of the COVID, entailed the need to design alternative modalities that would give continuity to the practices already started by the students, while guaranteeing the quality of the training and the acquisition of their skills.

To this end, two modalities of practices were defined:
1) Tele-practices: Designed for students with the possibility of doing remote practices in the assigned center. In these, the students had the teaching support of the professor and the virtual monitoring of the center's tutor.
2) Alternative activities of practices: Designed for students without the option of remote practices. In these activities, the students were able to carry out activities as close as possible to the skills of the subject, and the professors monitored them.

The objective of this research is to approach the experience lived by the students in these modalities, as well as to assess their perception of the learning process and the acquisition of the competences of the Practicum subject. To this end, we have collected the answers to a questionnaire from 55 students who took the subject in the second semester of the 2019-20 academic year.

The initial results, obtained through an inductive thematic content analysis, indicate that most students are satisfied with the proposed alternative activities and consider that they have been able to acquire the skills of the subject. Which have allowed them (between enough and a lot): analyze the demands and needs of people, groups or organizations (65%); make visible the need to work multidisciplinarily (73%); and define objectives and design an intervention plan in the scope of application (62%). Likewise, 73% of the students could identify themselves with the role of the psychologist. These results underline that, in terms of learning, it is feasible to adopt other alternatives, not face-to-face, to carry out the practices in situations of uncertainty.

Keywords:

Practicum, COVID, Distance learning, Alternative practices activities, Student’s experiences, Learning process.