How does the use of digital platforms impact on students marks at high education?

Abstract

[EN] More and more universities use educational digital platforms to support teaching. Due to the covid-19 crisis, and with the online teaching approval, the usage of digital platforms in universities has gone from being an option to a necessity. Therefore, efforts have been made to promote the use of existing platforms in each university. This has required teachers not only to make an effort to transform and adapt in record time all the presential teaching to virtual teaching, but also has required professors to learn how to use some of the features of existing digital platforms that were not familiar to them. However, did using this type of platforms positively impact on high education students marks? This study aims to determine if such impact existed in engineering schools. More concretely, this paper focus on engineering students from different grades and levels from the Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain, and on the use of the PoliformaT digital platform, which is an adaptation of Sakai platform for the mentioned university. Statistics data provided by PoliformaT about the number of visits, number of events with the platform, and downloaded documents per student for several subjects from the School of Industrial Engineering and the School of Informatics for the course 2019-2020 are analysed. Multiple linear regression models on marks obtained by students and their activity on PoliformaT platform have been built to determine if the usage of digital platforms has any relation with the students¿ marks. A varied casuistry is observed in the results. Relations of the analysed items with marks have been identified in some of the analysed subjects, still these relations being moderate. In this sense, some unconsidered factors might be influencing these relations, being appropriate to analyse them in future research. On the other hand, it is necessary to re-analyse this same scenario in future courses when both, students and professors, have enough usage level of the employed teaching tools. Next course we expect that some of the deficiencies identified in this first study will be reduced after both actors become familiar to these digital tools.