Remote Electronic Engineering Teaching during Lockdown: Lessons Learned

The devastating effects of COVID-19 pandemic led the Spanish government to adopt exceptional emergency regulations that forced the confinement of the entire population and, therefore, the cessation of on-site teaching. This forced the migration of teaching methodologies to virtual formats in a few weeks. The lack of specific resources and experience in online teaching, and the need of a rapid response meant that the measures adopted fostered a hybrid model between online and face-to-face teaching. This paper presents the context and the approach taken in the methodological adaptation of three subjects of Electronic Engineering with different characteristics. In addition, the results of the evaluation of these measures by students, obtained through a survey, are presented. The results show that virtualisation has produced a fictitious improvement in students' grades, as the assessment evidences. The students considered very positive the use of synchronous learning as opposed to asynchronous format, as well as all the activities that promoted direct communication between the student and the lecturer. Another generalised opinion extracted from the results of the survey is that the new measures have implied an excess of work for students. The experience gained and the students' opinions can be very useful for the design of blended learning formats, which seem to be a very promising alternative in the future of University, although this change seems to be non-trivial in such experimental studies as engineering.

Quarantined democracies: policy responses to the COVID-19 and the future of democracy

This contribution examines firstly the policies deployed by central governments around the world during the first epidemic outbreak of the COVID-19, in particular its degree of severity, and puts it in relation to the class and quality of the political regimes in those countries. According to the method followed, the main conclusion is that there is no clear correspondence between the political regime and the rigor of the measures adopted. Secondly, the text reflects on some foreseeable effects that the fight against the COVID-19 could have on representative democracy and also includes a very brief plea in favor of innovative democratic practices that, through stochastic procedures, stimulate well-informed collective decision processes and binding, whose basis is the universal and stable participation of citizens. It is presumed that such practices, deployed at local levels, could generate self-organized citizen communities that could be an agile instrument to face more effectively and equitably the fight against future pandemic outbreaks and any other kind of contingency.