Planning, Communication and Active Methodologies: Online Assessment of the Software Engineering Subject during the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic has had a high impact worldwide. The health crisis has not only had an impact on people's own health and on health systems, but has also affected other areas. In the educational context, the lockdown measures implemented by different governments have challenged the learning ecosystem. In the case of higher education in Spain, with a strong attendance factor in most public universities, face-to-face classes were interrupted after a month in the second term, ending the academic year in the online mode. This change has meant a great effort on the teachers’ side to transform the face-to-face teaching into the online approach, which in many cases has meant quite a comprehensive new design of the subject, changing the evaluation process and the methodologies used. This work presents a success case of online assessment developed in the Software Engineering I subject of the Degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Salamanca. The objective is to show how the previous use of active methodologies and the integration of educational technologies in classroom-based teaching facilitates the transformation of assessment to an online or blended approach while maintaining a high degree of student involvement and satisfaction. After presenting a comparison between the face-to-face approach and the adaptation to the online approach, an analysis is made of the learning results and student satisfaction concerning previous academic years. The results show that the change of approach has not reduced the satisfaction results obtained in previous courses. In terms of learning outcomes, there is an overall increase in the grades obtained by students in all assessment items