Aportaciones de B@UNAM frente a la pandemia

The COVID-19 pandemic that led to stay-at-home health measures in March 2020 challenged the entire education system capacity to respond quickly and effectively. As follows, we will present some of the actions taken by the areas of High School Distance Learning and Massive Open Online Courses (B@UNAM and MOOC) and by the Coordinación de Universidad Abierta, Innovación Educativa y Educación a Distancia (Open University, Educational Innovation and Distance Learning Vice-Chancellorship) to specifically address the mandatory lockdown situation.




Online courses by your own

As a consequence of the pandemic, teachers faced the pressure of having to set up an online course as quick as possible. The answer to their need was Cursos en línea: modelo para armar, the twenty-two-hour MOOC workshop made available at Coursera. MOOC design and production was done remotely in full, a huge challenge for the team. Thus, there was the possibility of jointly experimenting with and designing the instructions script, twelve hands working simultaneously. It was ready for delivery and implementation in a record time: six weeks that included the entire process of conception, design, production, post-production and prior-to-launch testing. The cost analysis according to the information available on massive open online courses indicated that developing this tool required 0.45 percent of an English course investment. The first course was given exclusively to nine hundred and five teachers from the ENP and CCH high-school systems. Later the course was opened to the public. Up to now, 10 296 students have enrolled in the course.

PAPIIT

The project Alianza B@UNAM, CCH y ENP ante la pandemia: un estudio de impacto en docentes y estudiantes (Alianza B@UNAM, CCH and ENP Before the Pandemic: a Study of the Impact on Teachers and Students) was one of the twelve projects selected in the 2020 special call of the Programa de Apoyo a Proyectos de Investigación e Innovación Tecnológica (PAPIIT, Support Program for Technological Research and Innovation Projects). The call was specifically focused on Research-Teaching Projects on Relevant Issues for Mexico. This project includes one hundred and six online support courses as well as a training workshop designed for improving online support teaching for the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria and the Colegio de Ciencias y Humanidades. The idea is that both national senior-high-school systems could count on a support alternative for special circumstances like the pandemic and a means for students’ practice in case of extraordinary examinations or an educational resource in face-to-face classes, etcetera.

The project research stage is carried out with the support of UNAM Geography Institute researchers (IGG) in order to study the impact of learning curricula subjects by virtual means as well as on the experience perception by teachers of face-to-face courses.

In addition, by the end of the project, four hundred and twenty-four resources will be ready to use as part of the online courses and will be made also available to the university community and the general public through Red Universitaria de Aprendizajes (RUA).


¡Éxito!

¡Éxito! is a tool designed to pre-train the high-school students who are starting university studies. This self-managed learning experience helps trainees in detecting his or her strengths through eleven evaluation instruments as well as in identifying better strategies to think and learn and resources useful for each particular career. In this way, in ten-hours time, over four weeks, they prepare four documents indicating the respective level as apprentice and a resources and solutions list that would help them during the first year. Finally, they obtain a personal commitments assessment orienting them on how to refine study and life habits in order to achieve a successful academic performance.

Sustaining teaching (webinars)

B@UNAM constantly participates in teaching-support webinars answering to the invitation of university agencies in Mexico and abroad. For twenty months we have offered webinars to help UNAM’s full-time teachers on topics such as educational videos development, accompanying courses design on various platforms, resources to enhance interactivity in educational platforms (such as H5P resources), Wikipedia’s use or audio equipment importance in teaching projects of any subject.

Based on the Colegio de Ciencias y Humanidades experience, we developed a methodology mentioned in chapter Webinar 1-2-3 (contained in the book by Sánchez Mendiola and Escamilla de los Santos, 2021) that seeks a greater involvement of the participants by learning before, during and after the session. The idea is that each participant does:

An initial homework that serves as an introduction to the subject and brings back to mind previous related knowledge, 

A practice using what the student already knows and learns from interacting with the person in charge of the session and the participating teachers and from studying the materials, and

A final exercise to be done in the following days to the synchronous session.

Since webinar recordings are available after the event, it is possible to break the time constraints and the synchronous/asynchronous dichotomy. In fact, we live a moment where time and distance are too relative concepts.

Teachers training courses

During the pandemic, we, at B@UNAM, have developed and made available to the university community training options on:
 

• Online counseling.
• Designing interactive learning activities using H5P.
• Online and hybrid teaching.
• Edit Wikipedia!
• Agile management of educational projects.

By the end of 2021, seven hundred and one UNAM teachers have taken online learning management courses offered at Moodle platform.

MOOC

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are part of UNAM’s effort to spread knowledge and culture in Mexico and throughout the world. Through these programs it is possible to explore new career paths and vocational options, delve deeper into topics already known and complement and update previous training courses. During the pandemic, with almost cero possibility of recording videos in a professional studio, fourteen new courses were created and four were updated to reach a total UNAM offer of one hundred and twelve courses and eleven specialized programs on Coursera platform by December 2021 (specialized programs contain sets of at least three courses on specific themes). Worldwide, online resources supply experienced an enrollment growth. Figures collected since 2014 show that there was an increase from 2 456 million registrations in December 2019 to 4 668 million by December 2021 (90%). In nearly two-year period, students from one hundred and ninety-six countries attended our courses.

And in the future…

We are constantly experimenting in the B@UNAM and MOOCs area. The pandemic gave us the opportunity to bring new solutions to our community, as well as to other education institutions inside and outside the country. It has been a period of intensive work to provide resources that will be used both during quarantine situations and in the technologically diverse learning environments spreading out as a result from the crisis.

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