Student perspectives on the COVID-19 emergency remote teaching at a catalan engineering school

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 health crisis, the UPF closed its physical doors in mid-March, in line with all other universities. As a result, all teaching activities (initially conceived as on-site) had to be reorganised in order to fit a new, totally online learning environment. The Teaching Quality and Innovation Support Unit (USQUID) at the UPF Engineering School and ICT Department has provided the students and teachers of the School with support and guidance in many ways, including devising a feedback questionnaire addressed to undergraduate students of the following degrees: Computer Engineering, Audiovisual Systems Engineering, Telecommunications Network Engineering, Mathematical Engineering in Data Science, and Biomedical Engineering. The questionnaire aimed to canvass the views of the students on key aspects of this switch, such as teaching methods used in every course, the management of teamwork, continuous assessment, materials made available, etc. The total number of respondents was 242, distributed as follows: 52 from the degree in Biomedical Engineering (taught in collaboration with another UPF department) and 190 from the ICT degrees. The results show that students do in fact prefer some features of this new way of working. For instance, according to the collected data, the availability of teachers to students (one of the advantages of on-site learning) has been preserved, something students value highly. They also appreciate the way lectures, seminars and practical sessions have been reorganised. On the other hand, results also show that it has been hard for our students to get on with their tasks within the deadlines set, possibly because they are generally not as autonomous and disciplined as the average student at online universities. Another difficulty related to this has been the planning of group activities, which are typically designed to be done on-site and have been necessarily adapted to online learning. We have gathered information and data that reflect how hard it is for group members to attend videoconferences simultaneously or even to form working groups, which has led them to perform tasks individually. These results show the importance of facilitating time slots and learning spaces in order to plan and perform group activities. This paper presents both the context and the results obtained from the study carried out in the UPF Engineering School and the ICT Department. It includes information on what aspects of online teaching are valued most highly by students with traditional profiles (those enrolled at on-site universities), especially regarding the links between synchronous and asynchronous learning. User pointers arise that may come in useful for the entire university community, in particular designing hybrid formats that will certainly be the educational tools used next year at all universities.