Service Learning as a Teaching Strategy of Seismic Vulnerability during the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 has generated the largest disruption of the present century, forcing mankind to evaluate many paradigms. Educators have faced the challenge to develop teaching strategies suitable for distance learning, which is particularly complex for those engineering concepts where service learning is an effective approach. This paper presents a remote service based learning strategy, used to teach seismic vulnerability assessment to fourth-year Civil Engineering students at Universidad de La Sabana in Colombia. This strategy involved five stages and was adapted to be carried out remotely by students in their homes using a combination of several tools such as remote maps. The main activities were the seismic vulnerability assessment of the students' houses and the remote assessment of the building stock of Cajica & PRIME;, a municipality close to the University campus. The learning outcomes were assessed using evaluation rubrics. The results show that the proposed strategy is effective, as 100% of students scored at the top level of the rubric at the fifth stage. In addition, they indicate that service learning in a close context like the family generates motivation and commitment in students to their learning process. Overall, this experience demonstrated that service learning is an effective strategy for teaching engineering concepts in a remote environment. It also showed that although COVID-19 required the development of new teaching strategies, this did not become a limitation to fulfill the learning outcomes.