The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted traditional face-to-face teaching worldwide and forced education institutions to adopt new, online teaching formats to enable students to continue with their studies. This research focuses on students’ perceptions of three teaching different modalities: face-to-face (F2F), Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) and Smart Classroom (SC), which were implemented in response to the restrictions enforced to combat the spread of COVID-19. A qualitative study based on two user experience techniques, Pocket Bipolar Laddering and Emotional Appraisal, was carried out on a group of second-year ICT engineering university students at La Salle Campus Barcelona. The former technique consists in identifying a maximum of three positive and three negative salient items, while the latter is intended to rate pairs of opposite feelings. In the SC format, saving time on travel to university was considered an advantage of online learning, while disadvantages included less effective instructor–student interaction, distractions when off-campus and teamwork issues. These shortcomings can be addressed by specific online teaching training to develop a more active form of learning and foment student participation. However, both ERT and SC modalities were considered effective solutions to cope with the social and mobility restrictions imposed during the pandemic.

tomatic refinement of an expressive speech corpus assembling subjective perception and automatic classification. Speech Communication, Elsevier : North-Holland, 2009, 51 (9) This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT AbstractThis paper presents an automatic system able to enhance expressiveness in speech corpora recorded from acted or stimulated speech. The system is trained with the results of a subjective evaluation carried out on a reduced set of the original corpus. Once the system has been trained, it is able to check the complete corpus and perform an automatic pruning of the unclear utterances, i.e. with expressive styles which are different from the intended corpus. The content which most closely matches the subjective classification remains in the resulting corpus. An expressive speech corpus in Spanish, designed and recorded for speech synthesis purposes, has been used to test the presented proposal. The automatic refinement has been applied to the whole corpus and the result has been validated with a second subjective test.

Qualitative research activities, including first-day of class surveys and user experience interviews on completion of a subject were carried out to obtain students’ feedback in order to improve the design of the subject ‘Information Systems’ as a part of a general initiative to enhance ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) engineering programs. Due to the COVID-19 (corona virus disease 2019) pandemic, La Salle URL adopted an Emergency Remote Teaching tactical solution in the second semester of the 2019–2020 academic year, just before implementing a strategic learning approach based on a new Smart Classroom (SC) system deployed in the campus facilities. The latter solution was developed to ensure that both on-campus and off-campus students could effectively follow the course syllabus through the use of new technological devices introduced in classrooms and laboratories, reducing the inherent difficulties of online learning. The results of our findings show: (1) No major concerns about the subject were identified by students; (2) Interaction and class dynamics were the main issues identified by students, while saving time on commuting when learning from home and access to recorded class sessions were the aspects that students considered the most advantageous about the SC.

This research examines the form in which undergraduates use video cameras during videoconferencing class sessions in a Smart Classroom context and, more specifically, the reasons why a considerable number of students opt to turn off their cameras when videoconferencing during the sessions while others keep them on. The study was carried out in an institution that had previously switched from face-to-face teaching to an Emergency Remote Teaching solution, initially adopted in 2019–2020 to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. Findings suggest that using cameras when videoconferencing is associated with increasing and enhancing the interaction between the student and the rest of the class, although not all students agreed with this conclusion. In addition, having the video cameras switched fomented socialization and improved the overall online learning experience for students. However, the surveyed students pointed out diverse negative elements, such as why they had to turn on their personal cameras, privacy concerns, and limitations derived from the available technology infrastructure, in addition to other factors such as distractions, anxiety, and cognitive load. This work discusses how these elements can influence the well-being and the user experience of the students, both positively and negatively.

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