The COVID-19 Pandemic as a driver of education 5.0 at UAH Faculty of Pharmacy

Introduction: In March 2020, the outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Madrid province, Spain, forced changes in the teaching and organisational methodologies of University educational centres in order to continue delivering knowledge contents that allowed students to acquire the competences and skills required by current regulations. Method(s): Different surveys were carried out on possible alternative teaching methodologies and strategies to be used by the teachers responsible for the different courses in the face of the pandemic situation. They explained to students how the teaching was going to proceed using different remote channels. Result(s): Different strategies such as the heuristic, discovery or playful method facilitated the teaching-learning process allowing students for the acquisition of useful knowledge, competences and skills for job placement. Innovative teaching methods were used, such as the inverted classroom or flipped classroom, cooperative learning, project-based learning or gamification, depending on the characteristics of the different disciplines. The results achieved so far have been, despite initial concerns and doubts, satisfactory, achieving the objectives and skills set at the beginning of the courses. The students have worked on specific, individual or cooperative projects, in which they have faced real problems in the context of service-learning, stimulating their critical thinking, communication, problem solving abilities, with a more practical and tangible dimension. Conclusion(s): The pandemic has accelerated the implementation of an Education 5.0 project, making teachers use resources that some but not all had used previously to promote effective and quality teaching. Combining the new technological tools with traditional educational methodologies helps teachers to achieve their teaching outcomes in a more effective way without losing sight to prepare students for lifelong learning far beyond the digital.

Evaluation of learning at UAH School of Pharmacy during the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction: The problem caused by the COVID-19 pandemic led teachers to use different tools to measure the learning process of students in a socially distanced context. For this reason, during the 2019-20 academic year, the teachers at the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Alcal, Spain, had to come up against the challenge of establishing a consistent, systematic and rigorous online evaluation system to screen which students had the competences and skills demanded by current regulations. Method(s): A survey was designed using Google forms and addressed, from the Dean's office, to professors and lecturers of the five undergraduate courses, concerning the type of evaluation tools that they were going to use with the students in order to proceed with a sound evaluation, taking into account that data protection regulations had to be respected, rigorously. Result(s): Doubts were raised about integrity and ethics when carrying out the different online evaluation tests. News appeared in the media and social networks about how to know the correct answers in a questionnaire through its source code, by hiring experts who solve the exams, or doing the activities together using the versatility of social networks that allow simultaneous collective interaction, etc. In this survey, in addition to indicating the number of tests to be performed, the teachers informed the authors about the tools available for use: short answer questions, multiple choice tests, essay or interrelated concepts questions with clear evaluation rubrics, reflection on practical cases, open-book exams. Conclusion(s): All teachers learned and adapted quickly to the different assessment tools available on the Blackboard platform according to the characteristics of the course and considered that the pandemic has opened a critical window for innovative technology based-assessment methodologies.

Building Emergent Cycling Infrastructure During the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Case of Zapopan, México

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to strict measures intended to limit people's movement and slow viral spread. The subsequent need for social distancing when traveling has driven many cities to reduce public transport services, as urban residents simultaneously stay at home and avoid crowded spaces. As a result, cities are turning to cycling to meet the mobility needs of their inhabitants, particularly those who lack access to a private vehicle. Infrastructure plays a critical role in encouraging cycling by protecting cyclists and providing safe and comfortable conditions for users of various confidence levels. Due to the pandemic, this infrastructure has been rapidly constructed, in many cases, as pop-up or temporary installations. In this article, we present and examine the design methods and community response to an emergent bike lane along Avenida Guadalupe in Zapopan, México during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this examination, the paper distills and highlights the key features of a successful emergent bike lane in the urban Global South and identifies gaps in need of filling. The emergent intervention is 4.2 km and includes a number of traffic calming elements such as bollards and markings, connecting the peripheral part of the city to the existing cycle infrastructure. This case study shall contribute to a greater understanding of emergency mobility planning practices during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as future directions for the expansion of cycling infrastructure and networks, especially in Latin America and the broader Global South. Copyright © 2022 Ohlund, El-Samra, Amezola, Soto Morfín, López Zaragoza and Aguilar Gónzalez.

Digital Platform to promote sustainable mobility and COVID-19 infections reduction: A use case in the Guadalajara metropolitan area

This work proposes a digital platform based in a multi-agent system to plot the different mobility alternatives to counteract the agglomerations in public transport and therefore decrease COVID-19 infections in the GDL. Following the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the face of the health emergency of COVID-19, mainly keeping a healthy distance, the GDL can integrate sustainable mobility as the public bicycle system and reduce the users in regular transport routes to safe levels. For that endeavor, we develop an analysis of the behavior of the trips in the public transport of Guadalajara to explore the possibility of substituting the short transfers of bus travel by bicycle travels using the existing public bicycle infrastructure. We introduce a multi-agent simulation to plot different scenarios of mobility moving bicycles and buses. In this preliminary work, we show possibilities of the simulation integrating as variables not only the risk of COVID-19 infection but also the impact on economy and traffic reduction, CO2 Footprint, and health achieved with this multimodal mobility simulation. Also, the simulation can help to incentivize safer and efficient mobility strategies in the public transport system to reduce the use of private vehicles. © 2020 IEEE.