Study on the determining factors to maintain a quality education in times of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

[EN] Within the actual academic environment that has led (due to mobility restrictions and social distancing imposed by the health emergency as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic) to online teaching, students and teachers have had to adapt their coexistence and learning parameters. After an academic semester of changing the teaching model, and with the vital experience of students and teachers, the students from a highly representative university subject have been asked to fulfill a questionnaire for evaluating which have been the initiatives or actions that have helped them the most to obtain and value the education received in the University as inclusive and of quality. This links and responds to the pursuit of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number 4, defined as the United Nations (UN) as "Quality Education". To carry out the study, a last-year university degree subject has been selected (to ensure that the students are mature), where an online course has already been taught (to ensure that they have already lived the experience and have criteria and valuable proposals for improvement), a subject with a highly interactive character (where the online format may require a greater change of approach), and with a high number of students. The subject that has been selected for the study has been "Organizational Behavior and Change Management", that is an optional subject in the last year of the Computer Engineering Degree and double Degree with Business Administration and Management, which is taught at the Higher Polytechnic School of Alcoy (EPSA). This subject is focused on the knowledge and practical application of the psychological, social, and human mechanisms that make people and their interpersonal relationships a success in the sense of group cohesion. The main objective is to establish which are the tools and signals that can make a team leader identify group behavior problems and can redirect them, at the same time that he identifies the virtues such as team functioning and enhances and extends them. Given that the expectations regarding the duration of mobility restrictions and social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic are in the medium / long term (there is no forecast of its remission in the short term), it is expected that the conclusions obtained in the present study may be used in the planning of the educational model for the next academic courses. In addition, it has taken advantage of the fact that the subject's fundamental focus is to work on the attitudes and skills necessary to efficiently manage group cohesion through interpersonal relationships, to deal with the assurance of the quality of education from the point of view of view of functioning as a group. The conclusions obtained show that students see as very positive all initiatives for increasing the participation of students in class on a daily and continuous basis, using any accelerators for active participation. Any effort made for trying to save the social distancing (i.e., performing any face-to-face permitted activity) are also very well valued from students. The most requested initiative from students in order to improve the quality of university education at this time has been to put the focus on the effective learning (through practical activities in theoretical and practice classes) and effective evaluation (through practical cases analysis or any other way far different from the traditional question-answer evaluation method where it could seem to be even more important monitoring students so that they do not cheat rather than assessing their effective learning).