Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Education plays a fundamental role in society. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), education is a human right for all throughout life, and access to instruction must be accompanied by quality (UNESCO, 2020).
Since the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to close their doors. At the highest peak of the pandemic, at the beginning of April, more than 1,484,715,875 students were affected worldwide (UNESCO, 2021), this caused some students to lose their learning, others abandoned their studies, in addition to the obvious inequality due to the digital divide.
Currently, educational centers, both in basic education and at university level, have implemented modalities and study mechanisms that allow students to develop their studies, despite the health crisis occurring in the world. According to UNESCO, the aforementioned figure has dropped to 144,697,476 students (UNESCO, 2021), so there is still a long way to go.
Once the universities closed, this meant that teaching would immediately be in an online format. Although the form has been urgent and almost mandatory, it can be argued that for the most part there is acceptance in terms of the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which, while living in the digital age, confinement has resulted in both teachers and students making an overexertion to attend to their activities (Garcia-Peñalvo & Correll, 2020).
In this regard, Hodges Charles et al. (2020) adds that, although changing the modality of study “may allow flexibility of teaching and learning anywhere and at any time (...) the speed with which this change to online education is expected to happen is unprecedented and astonishing”.
Although there are certain principles that should be considered for the design of quality online activities, it is evident that we are not facing a scenario of this type, but an emergency virtualization that was not planned at the beginning, and over time has been studied, at the same time as the development of classes.
According to Acero et al. (2020), virtual education is based on a cooperative educational model where participants (teachers-students) interact using ICT, mainly the Internet and its associated services.
And more specifically, we have as scenarios virtual environments, these technological innovations support in the teaching-learning process, simulate a real environment in order to carry out educational processes, activities, evaluations, incorporations, in addition to advertising purposes such as master classes, lectures or others (Mon & Cervera, 2013).
In the case of Ecuador, 23 universities submitted their emergency plan to implement blended learning classes, which is currently being evaluated, while the national Emergency Operations Committee (COE) has already approved the return to classes for those schools in rural areas that submitted pilot plans. A total of 77 educational centers will resume activities in March 2021 (Heredia Valeria, 2021).
These emergency plans are due to the measures taken in relation to online classes, new education models were used such as inverted classrooms, the use of tools such as zoom, Google Meet, among others (Iglesias-Pradas et al., 2021).
Once the periods 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 have culminated, it is worth doing a retrospective on the experiences lived and lessons left by these academic years that have great relevance in the research, in turn, what happened leads us to a redefinition of the actors, subjects, contents, scenarios, actors and methodologies, in the expectation of being able to move to a fully face-to-face scenario.
The study initially presents the methodology used for the development of the research. In the second part, related studies are shown. The Israel University of Technology (UISRAEL) is the case study, so the third part will comment on what was applied during this modality. The fourth section shows the results represented in graphs as a result of the surveys applied to both professors and students. And finally, the conclusions are commented.