From the Classroom to Home: Experiences on the Sudden Transformation of Face-to-Face Bioengineering Courses to a Flexible Digital Model Due to the 2020 Health Contingency Chapter in Scopus uri icon

abstract

  • © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.During these first months of 2020, the world is experiencing the most ruthless health crisis in modern history. This has led different areas of society to change their lifestyle or the way they are carried out. One of them is teaching, especially engineering education. This has required a sudden transformation of the methodology and the use of digital tools, as well as the training of teachers in an expeditious manner. The Tecnologico de Monterrey, one of the best private universities in Latin America, stopped its activities on March 20 to promote social distancing as a security measure against the COV19 (SARS-2-COV coronavirus) pandemic. This implied that at week 6 of the spring semester 2020, the courses would suddenly become a part of a newly implemented flexible digital model from home for both, the teacher and the student, preventing attendance to school facilities. In this manuscript, we analyze the response of 3 groups of specific subjects from the Bioengineering Department that were migrated. One of these subjects was precisely the Microbiology Laboratory for Engineers, which involved a major challenge. The teachers received adequate training for a week and students were then transferred to the new synchronous online model. Knowledge acquisition analysis and satisfaction surveys showed that the implementation of this digital model was adequate to achieve the academic objectives set from the beginning of the 2019¿2020 academic year.

publication date

  • January 1, 2021