Students' views on teleteaching in the electronic industrial engineering degree

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has brought an unprecedented situation in all areas of society in the heart of the 21st century. The university sector has been immersed in a sudden change to adapt with great haste to the new conditions of confinement, going from face-to-face to virtual teaching. The degree in Industrial Electronics Engineering offered by University of Almería, all teaching has been carried out in a distance format because of the health crisis. This paper presents the opinion of the students on the methodology developed under these circumstances. This methodology has been based on the use of new technologies available within the University of Almería. The technologies were used as support for the campus-based learning, and nowadays they have acquired great prominence in online teaching. The changes in methodologies for the online learning adaptation of the subjects were previously approved and published for the general interest of the students in their corresponding addendum. In the Addendums, the changes in the theoretical and practical methodology of each subject are collected, as well as the assessment standards. The opinion of 103 students from three different subjects has been analyzed, one of them a 2nd grade core subject, Basic Electronics (66.99% students) and two 3rd grade compulsory subjects, Power Electronics (19.42% students) and Digital Electronics (13.59% students). Online surveys were implemented through the virtual classroom of the respective subjects. The surveys have considered virtual teaching within the field of theoretical as well as practical electronics and they have made possible the establishment of performance indicators such as the potentiality of the educational resource, the promotion of self-learning, didactic versatility, didactic difficulties, didactic efficiency and evaluation. Most of the students disagree with the quality of all indicators, except for the one related to didactic difficulty. The opinion of second grade students is not clear, there are similar percentages between those who agree and those who do not. Third-year students present a general opinion on the didactic difficulty in theoretical questions of the subject. All opinions have also been analyzed by grade because they present different responses. Second-year students value the methodology used in the practical lessons more negatively, while third-year students are more concerned about the development of the theoretical methodology. In the part referred to evaluation, 52.51% disagree with the system established. Third-year students show a general opinion in disagreement with the online assessment system. If these results are analyzed objectively, the percentages of passed, failed and absent students for the three subjects do not show significant differences in the last recent years. Therefore, the established online assessment methodology has not caused any changes in the rating of the students’ performance. To improve the opinion of the students surveyed, actions to promote the efficiency of virtual teaching should be considered in the next courses. The evaluation criteria should also be revised to adapt them to the specific characteristics of virtual teaching. The number of students surveyed in future calls should be increased to gather more conclusive results and avoid possible misinterpretations.