COVID-19 in Spain: Transition from Face-to-Face to Emergency Remote Teaching for an Industrial Electronics and Automation Engineering Degree

This paper analyzes the changes for a degree in Industrial Electronics and Automation Engineering at a Spanish university in the confinements caused by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The purpose was to find out the practices that the faculty university intuitively choose for use in teaching and evaluation, and to check if they were adequate in the emergency situation. The challenges faced by university faculty worldwide following the confinements caused by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic were enormous and have no precedence in the digital knowledge era. The study of the teaching transitions realized allow the university and all agents involved to better reinforce the strong points and to focus improvements on the weak points with the goal of better preparedness for future crises. Three aspects of the transition to online teaching are considered: the changes in the evaluation systems, the preferred modes (synchronous, asynchronous, or bichronous) and the tools most used. According to the results, the evaluation systems enjoyed a level of stability that indicated institutional tools already existed providing online support for successful execution. The interaction between teacher and student dominated the basic training and compulsory course subjects, while asynchronous teaching was more apt for the elective subjects. Text-type teaching resources were chiefly used. While it was true more multimedia types could have been used, the suddenness of the changes as well as the uncertainty around their durations may have contributed to their incomplete development.