Education during emergencies demands attention from both institutions and governments, as the incidence of disasters and crises continues to increase worldwide due to various challenges that threaten humanity, including climate change, terrorism, food and water scarcity, energy crises, poverty, and inequality. Emergency remote teaching (ERT) is a critical factor in providing academic opportunities, building resilience, and promoting recovery for affected individuals. This research examines the challenges associated with transitioning from face-to-face to online/digital lessons, according to the perceptions of 105 professors in a Mexican private university, 2 months after mandatory online/digital teaching was implemented. By analyzing data collected through a survey using statistical and data mining techniques, we identified factors that should be considered when designing future education in emergency situations. The study found that while most professors positively evaluated their performance in ERT, they still preferred face-to-face teaching due to the lack of personal interaction and distractions. Professors adapted to ERT with technological training provided by the institution, but reported an increase in workload and the importance of the balance between job responsibilities and family issues. The study also revealed that professors’ performance in ERT depended on the conditions of their teaching space at home. Furthermore, the study suggested the need for the development of an improved assessment framework for online evaluation methods, and integration of the most effective online and face-to-face teaching strategies for everyday academic contexts. The sudden change in education modality represented a fantastic opportunity to introduce teaching-learning-evaluating strategies and technologies while forcing institutions to evolve into the digital environment. Therefore, every education stakeholder should identify and implement best practices of the online and face-to-face modalities to improve future education in emergencies.
A learning activity was designed for the topic functions and derivatives contextualized in the themes of corruption and water pollution, which was contrasted against a traditional activity. This was done as a tool to promote interest and usefulness sense of mathematics in first-year social science undergraduate students. The students who participated in the activity had an incipient perceived usefulness of mathematics and their interest was focused on social, economic and environmental issues. It was concluded that the context provoked a better performance of the students in those questions related to interpretation of concepts, while it did not show significant benefits in those that required the repetition of an algorithm. Finally, the students perceived the contextualized activity with greater pleasure, interest and usefulness sense over the traditional one, improving to a greater extent their mathematical competence.
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