Lessons Learned from the Educational Experience during COVID-19 from the Perspective of Latin American University Students

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the educational context. University students were exposed to an educational transition from a face-to-face context to emergency remote teaching (ERT). This change affected the educational experience of students and teachers in general, and impacted their educational performance, as well as their emotional and mental health, among other aspects. However, learning from the successes during the ERT and reflecting on good and bad practices will allow us to configure effective learning scenarios that respond to the new normal. The objective of this paper is to describe and present the lessons learned during ERT from the experience of university students in Latin America who have already returned to face-to-face instruction. The study used a qualitative inductive approach and a phenomenographic design. The sample consisted of 640 undergraduate students (63% women) of higher education who experienced online education during the year 2021 and a face-to-face modality during the first semester of 2022, belonging to universities in Chile, Venezuela, and Ecuador. The results suggest that new learning scenarios should consider specific pedagogical practices, including active, collaborative, meaningful, and problem-based strategies, together with a diversity of feedback practices. It is concluded that the ERT brought good practices that should guide university educational policies. © 2023 by the authors.

Designing a Moodle Plugin for Promoting Learners’ Self-regulated Learning in Blended Learning

After the COVID-19 pandemic, universities moved towards online and Blended Learning (BL) modes to offer greater curricular flexibility. Yet, recent research shows that students have difficulties regulating their learning strategies to adapt to the different learning modes that BL entails, which mixes face-to-face with online activities taking place in different learning contexts and environments. Prior work on Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) has explored the use of dashboard-based scaffolds for supporting students’ learning strategies. However, most existing solutions are designed for supporting students in online settings (i.e., MOOCs), disregarding the teachers’ role in BL settings and the support they need to monitor and promote students’ SRL. This paper presents the design process followed for transforming a tool designed for supporting students’ SRL in MOOCs into a Moodle plugin for BL. Following a design-based research methodological approach, we describe all the phases conducted for identifying the most appropriate indicators and visualizations for supporting SRL in BL practices, implementing and evaluating a first prototype. Results of a local evaluation with 114 teachers and a broad evaluation with 311 students shed some light on the type of indicators, dashboards and functionalities that should be considered when designing solutions for supporting SRL in BL settings. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.