Abstract:

The irruption of sarscov19 in the spring of 2020 was a challenge for everyone, particularly for university teaching, where solutions had to be improvised urgently. Technological resources and online teaching played a fundamental role, and the involvement of students, teachers and administration led to an acceptable outcome.

After the first impact of the pandemic, new alternatives compatible with the protocols of social distancing and health security were proposed in the planning of the academic year 2020-2021. The fundamental problem was that the number of students was excessive for the size of the classrooms, not allowing the safety distances guarantee proposed by the health authorities. As in many other universities, a synchronous hybrid learning (SHL) model was proposed at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), combining online learning and face-to-face activities. In the SHL model, some students attend classes in-person (the room capacity limited the number according to the minimum distances between people required) and stream for the rest of the students, who followed the class simultaneously. In addition, the classes were recorded to enable their asynchronous use.

This SHL model was beneficial for students and teachers who could attend classes and those who were confined. Depending on the conditions, the SHL was not used. Vulnerable teachers were teaching entirely online their groups. When the number of students in a group was small enough, teaching was fully face-to-face, maintaining the online option only for vulnerable or confined students. The laboratory practices followed a similar hybrid scheme. The tutorials were attended by email or videoconference, and the exams were preferably in-person, with ad hoc solutions in the cases of confined or vulnerable students.

Once the academic year is over, it is appropriate to assess whether the proposed SHL model worked as expected when compared with face-to-face or online, and what would be the best model in the event of a similar situation.

Between February and June 2021, a pilot experience was carried out in the Electricity course of the degree in Electronic Engineering and Industrial Automation at the UPV, where three groups were taught with a different methodology: online SHL and face-to-face teaching. Planning, academic resources, and evaluation were the same in the three groups. All three followed active flipped classroom methods.

In this paper, the student's academic outcomes and the results of an opinion survey conducted on the activities are presented. Results are analysed in terms of the three groups/methodologies. The gender study is also included.

The results show reasonable doubts about the SHL model. The academic results and the student's opinions are significantly lower than the other two methodologies. These results could help to decide the best methodological solution if we had a similar situation in the future.

Keywords:

Synchronous hybrid learning, sarscov19, flipped classroom, students' academic outcomes, opinion survey.