The Outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic and its Social Impact on Education: Were Engineering Teachers Ready to Teach Online?

Abstract

The major impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are still affecting all social dimensions. Its specific impact on education is extensive and quite evident in the adaptation from Face-to-Face (F2F) teaching to online methodologies throughout the first wave of the pandemic and the strict rules on lockdown. As lesson formats changed radically, the relevance of evaluating student on-line learning processes in university degrees throughout this period became clear. For this purpose, the perceptions of engineering students towards five specific course units forming part of engineering degree courses at the University of Burgos, Spain, were evaluated to assess the quality of the online teaching they received. Comparisons were also drawn with their perceptions of the F2F teaching of the course units prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. According to the students’ perceptions, the teachers possessed the technical knowledge, the social skills, and the personal capabilities (empathy and understanding of the at times troubled situation of each student) for a very abrupt adaptation of their courses to an online methodology. The shortcomings of the online teaching were related to its particularities and each teacher’s personality traits. Overall, engineering teachers appeared well prepared for a situation of these characteristics and, if similar online teaching scenarios were ever repeated, the quality of engineering teaching appears to be guaranteed.

The Higher Education Sustainability before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Spanish and Ecuadorian Case

“…The difference between working experience could also imply that younger university teachers should receive further pedagogic training or make available models focused on ICTs inclusion to achieve sustainability in higher education. These results corroborate the findings of a great deal of the previous work that indicated how working experience, and possibility the of the workers' age [88], is a major factor in the ITCs skills [79], is also highly evaluated in this university teachers with an engineering background [65,89].…”

“…Moreover, Spain is an example of relegating the educational policies to focus on health measures; this country presents much more disparity because of diversity between territories [64]. Meanwhile, Spanish researchers have highlighted how the use of ICTs has negatively impacted teachers' health and how the students considered that the university teachers were capable and could change from face-to-face to online education [65,66]. Although few studies and reports have focused on the university level [28,67,68], the implementation of online teaching was carried out in some scenarios without training, resources, or skills, implying longer hours of working [69].…”

“…In Ecuador, recent researches have focused on the mental health of Ecuadorian students focusing on the pressure and impact of using ICTs [72], resources available at the time [60], and the experience of the teacher [72]. In Spain publications, researchers have focused on students' perspectives regarding the change to the education, use of the ICTs, and only little has included the teachers' point of view [28,65,67,72,74]. One Spanish research had as participants the university teachers training the future teachers from elementary schools, although the objective was to evaluate the impact of ICTs on the teaching process [75].…”

EU27 Higher Education Institutions and COVID-19, Year 2020

“…Over time, several experiments were made using other pedagogical models, such as flipped classroom [19] or working in pairs [20], and using various digital media available such as portfolios, wikis, or digital tests [21]. Many studies reveal that some teachers appeared to be well prepared for a situation, so, if similar online teaching scenarios were ever repeated, the quality of teaching seems to be guaranteed [22]. A study establishes five priority attributes of online teaching to achieve quality: interaction between students, level of student concentration in online classes, improvement of the online test review system, and improved student satisfaction with online teaching and diversity of assessment tests [23].…”

The rapid transition from campus to online teaching – how are students’ perception of learning experiences affected?

“…In some cases, circumstances allowed authors to implement questionnaires to make comparisons of student experiences before and after the shift to online learning. For example, Revilla-Cuesta et al (2021) acted quickly to create a questionnaire about the students' learning experience that they administered to students during the first week of online classes (to assess experiences of face-to face learning) and again at the end of the term (to assess online learning), and then compared results. Knudson (2020) had previously developed a concept inventory for student learning in his subject, biomechanics, which he deployed both at the start of online learning (to test learning from faceto-face instruction) and at the end (to compare online learning), coupled with an end-of-term questionnaire.…”