Challenges and Experiences of Online Evaluation in Courses of Civil Engineering During the Lockdown Motivated by the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

As a consequence of the global sanitary crisis in early 2020, universities had to tackle with a sudden shift in their teaching-learning strategies so that the preset competences could be fulfilled. This study presents the learning outcomes of the tasks implemented, student experiences and feedback, as well as some reflections from the instructors with a holistic perspective of the courses due to the measures and adaptations adopted. Six courses taught at Civil Engineering degrees of three universities, two from Spain and one from Peru, are analyzed. The teaching and evaluation strategies are described and some reflections are made by comparing the student’s performance with the previous course. Although the shift to online learning had to be made from day to day, with no time for preparation, the experience has proved that online learning can be beneficial in some aspects and have probably come to stay, although some others are difficult to replace with respect to face-to-face learning, especially students’ engagement and motivation.

Post-COVID-19 strategies for higher education institutions in dealing with unknown and uncertainties

“…While many higher education institutions strategize for Education 4.0, the pandemic has unexpectedly disrupted everything. For example, changes have been observed in teaching (Drijvers et al, 2021;10.3389/feduc.2022.992063 Arday, 2022), learning and assessment experiences (García-Alberti et al, 2021;St-Onge et al, 2022), mobility (Yıldırım et al, 2021), mental wellbeing (Gurvich et al, 2021), graduate employment (Gill, 2020), and even the meaning of education (Cairney and Kippin, 2022). Online education is not just an additional activity to the learning process.…”