Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a disruptive event on many levels, changing from one day to the next people’s way of life. Higher education institutions have had to quickly adapt to these changes, at times without sufficient infrastructure or digitally-literate personnel. Students have also faced these same struggles, due to lack of online access to their campus but also due to changes in their family, work and general environment.

Within higher education, end of degree and master’s capstone projects pose a unique challenge from students as they are quite different from other subjects due to the amount of autonomous work and research required. In this article we will explore the impact that the COVID19 pandemic has had on students developing their capstone projects through the examples of the Digital Design Degree and Digital Graphic Design Master’s from International La Rioja University (UNIR).

UNIR is a Spanish online university with students from all over the world and campuses in seven countries. While it has also struggled to keep up with the challenges posed by the current pandemic, it already had the infrastructure for distance learning and both teachers and students were familiar with the online platforms required. Any study on the impact of COVID19 on higher education performed with samples from this university can exclude the difficulties imposed by migrating to the digital realm.

The proposed methodology is a combination of both quantitative analysis and qualitative interpretation. This sample will include 421 students, mainly from Spain, Colombia and Ecuador.

A quantitative comparison has been carried out of how many students registered and successfully completed their capstone projects during the 2020 Spring semester. An analysis of whether students delivered on time their coursework throughout the semester has also been included, in an attempt to locate if any critical dates exist. These numbers have been compared with those from previous years. To interpret these numbers, thesis directors will be interviewed to assess what difficulties they perceived students were facing and how the pandemic affected them.

The data comparison and the survey results indicate that the pandemic has influenced student performance and work quality in the thesis presented during this semester. There is a trend towards extremes in the results, with a greater number of lower quality papers and also the first failed ones in the degree. One the other hand, there has also been an increase in the number of papers eligible for maximum qualifications with honours.

Keywords:

Student engagement, capstone project, online learning, higher education, COVID-19.