Methodological recommendations to face an online semester in a catastrophic situation: the case of a computer science program during the COVID-19 lockdown

Abstract

The pandemic context forced most of the Higher Education Institutions, and therefore their faculties, to face a semester of teaching in an online mode. The universities defined general guidelines and strategies to try to guarantee a minimum quality of the process. However, the literature reports that, depending on its particularities, preparing a semester-long online course requires a design of several months. Therefore, each lecturer worked according to her experience, guidelines, and support she received: "What could be done, was done." This article reports the teaching experience of the 1st semester 2020 of the Computer Science undergraduate program at the Universidad Católica de Temuco. Some lecturers of this undergraduate program had previous experience in online training; hence they designed strategies that differed in teaching, evaluation, and interaction methodologies while using several technologies available to them. A sample of 115 of our students answered a questionnaire to assess the preferences and problems during this semester. The results show a heterogeneous set of clusters. However, they point to a constructivist asynchronous vision in a group of our students that prefer short videos uploaded by their professors, and the resources that, by their means, they find on the Internet, point towards a constructivist asynchronous vision in a group of our students. The results also allowed us to rescue good practices that help in proposing an emergency online teaching model that will guide the design of the second-semester courses.