Graduate students' appreciation of an online university teaching course based on mental modeling

Distance education has gained prominence due to its broad geographical reach, but also thanks to the pandemic caused by COVID-19. Given this advancement, a question arises-what the best way is to implement distance education? A transversal consensus that has been used so far indicates that it should be carried out based on instructional design, but in the face of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Information and Communication Technologies, is this sufficient? Didactics has been fundamental in face-to-face education to guide the teaching and learning process and ensure its success. However, in distance education, didactics seems to be incipient, without a clear class planed sequence that allows guiding and measuring learning. This research shows a didactic approach based on mental modeling to teach science and its respective evaluation by the students, being the first time, this methodology was introduced in the institution where it was applied. A telematic course was designed for university teaching to teach science to graduate students who were enrolled in some science program. These 21 students were surveyed about their perception of the didactic approach used to teach this course. The results show, for the most part, high acceptance values on the Likert scale regarding its use, supported in the discussion of the fundamentals of neuroscience. The coherence of the responses was analyzed using the similarity index (a new consistency index proposed), finding that they were mostly coherent.