Abstract:

Although the use of digital learning environments was already recurrent in many traditional Higher Educational Institutions (HEI) as a complement to face-to-face classes, the emergence of COVID-19 forced institutions to quickly swift to fully online learning. The impulse of digital tools as well as the transformation of Teaching and Learning (T&L) methods, exposed many institutional gaps both in terms of teaching and in terms of technical and pedagogical support. It became clear that not all teachers and students were prepared for such a sudden change and many Universities were forced to define and intensify strategies to help and enhance e-learning literacy throughout their academic community.

This study aims to present the support strategy adopted by the Educational Technologies (ET) unit of the University of Porto (U.Porto) during COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2003, U.Porto, through the ET unit, has provided all teachers and students’ free access to a Learning Management System (LMS) integrated with several digital solutions, training actions and audiovisual resources to support their pedagogical activities. During the lockdown, to better respond to the needs of its academic community, the ET unit has adapted many of its support methods: moved all training to webinar format, increased the number of video tutorials, made available a virtual agenda for scheduling personalized meetings for technical and pedagogical consultancy and intensified contact via Open-Source Ticket Request System (OTRS) to increase its responsiveness.

The research method applied in this study combines quantitative and qualitative approaches. The technique used for data collection was observation using an analysis grid. The construction of the analysis grid was based on the needs expressed by users through the OTRS. Data collected from the e-learning platform – MOODLE U.Porto – and other digital tools were also analyzed.

The analysis of the support requests through the analysis grid contributes to making the necessary adjustments to the ET unit action strategy during COVID-19 at the level of training topics to offer, production of technical materials (tutorials, documentation, online courses, etc.) and improvement of internal (between technical teams’ staff) and external (teachers and students with technical staff) communication channels.

The main conclusions of this study allow to understand the importance of technical and pedagogical support teams concerning educational technologies, offer suggestions on how to qualify teachers and students to the use of e-learning systems and digital tools and raise some questions that need to be thought and defined by HEI decision-makers, policy-makers, teachers, technical and infrastructure teams if we want to be successfully acquainted for the use of digital learning environments without compromised the education process and the students learning path.

Keywords:

COVID-19, digital learning environments, e-learning, online learning, technical support, educational technologies, MOODLE.