Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted traditional face-to-face teaching worldwide and forced education institutions to adopt new, online teaching formats to enable students to continue with their studies. This research focuses on students’ perceptions of three teaching different modalities: face-to-face (F2F), Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) and Smart Classroom (SC), which were implemented in response to the restrictions enforced to combat the spread of COVID-19. A qualitative study based on two user experience techniques, Pocket Bipolar Laddering and Emotional Appraisal, was carried out on a group of second-year ICT engineering university students at La Salle Campus Barcelona. The former technique consists in identifying a maximum of three positive and three negative salient items, while the latter is intended to rate pairs of opposite feelings. In the SC format, saving time on travel to university was considered an advantage of online learning, while disadvantages included less effective instructor–student interaction, distractions when off-campus and teamwork issues. These shortcomings can be addressed by specific online teaching training to develop a more active form of learning and foment student participation. However, both ERT and SC modalities were considered effective solutions to cope with the social and mobility restrictions imposed during the pandemic.
Highlights
IntroductionPublisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
All emotion pairs except EP6 and EP9 show significant differences between some of the means of the three class modalities
When experiencing Smart Classroom (SC) classes, some comments are in the same line, whereas others believe that students that are in the classroom interact more than students that are attending off-campus classes
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The outbreak of COVID-19 in December 2019 quickly became a worldwide pandemic in 2020 [1] due to its high transmission and mortality rates. COVID-19 originates from the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes viral respiratory disease [2]. In order to cope with the multifaced issues derived from the virus, different measures were adopted by governments and institutions in order to minimize the spread of the disease [3,4,5]. In 2020, the direct effects of COVID-19 and all the adopted measures that were taken to try to stop the pandemic had a significant impact on worldwide economies [9,10,11]
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