Analysis of digital teaching tools in the new educational paradigm

Abstract

[EN] Nowadays most high education professors use several digital tools to support teaching, such as education platforms and other sources like digital slides or digital documents. Most universities rely on their own educational platforms, which has been mainly used to share documents between professors and students. These platforms reinforce the master classes, but do not replace the typical face-to-face classes. For instance, the platform used by the Universitat Politècnica de València in 2006 is called PoliformaT and is an adaptation of Sakai. On this digital platform, professors and students can share and manage information and documents from their degree or master subjects, such as tasks, exams, content repository, etc. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, the high education professors forced to replace face-to-face classes by virtual classes, to confront the new educational paradigm that has emerged. Furthermore, they have had to deepen into the functionalities offered by existing platforms and to adapt their teaching to other types of platforms that allow virtual teaching such as Microsoft Teams, Google Classroom or Blackboard Learn. Therefore, because of the current situation and the potential that e-learning platforms and tools have in university teaching, it has led to the emergence of numerous software related to teaching. However, due to the short reaction time to adapt face-to-face to virtual teaching, no comparisons have been made between existing digital tools to define which of them is most appropriate for each university and its teaching style. Hence, a deep analysis of existing digital tools to support teaching is required. This paper aims to analyse and compare several teaching software tools. For that, the functionalities of the most used teaching tools are compared, and their main advantages and disadvantages are analysed in order to obtain the best tools to be used in high education.