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Digital technology has helped our universities continue with the teaching activity during the State of Alarm declared in Spain due to Covid-19 assisting both national and international students. The purpose of our universities is always to ensure education for our students who are going to conclude the academic year in the same learning and appraisal conditions.
The suspension of in-class lessons and the subsequent declaration of the State of Alarm have prompted Universities to develop online teaching resources. A new teaching methodology that CEU Universities have successfully achieved thanks to their capacity to foresee this situation by training the staff as well as investing in technology resources, its commitment to digital transformation in the last years and the response capacity of government teams.
Universidad CEU Cardenal Herrera
For example, at Elche, Alicante, Valencia and Castellón campus lessons are taught normally thanks to the Blackboard platform.
At CEU UCH they had already designed a contingency plan to improve the online educational experience based on its digital platforms thanks to its alliance with Microsoft and to the effort of the teaching team and the administration and services staff.
This plan outlines special teaching action steps based on LMS an online education and digital tools platform that eases constant communication between students, access to work materials and additional resources, online support tuition and a work schedule designed by professors.
In addition in order to develop higher educational skills, CEU UCH has organized a special connection timetable in streaming between students and professors. These sessions favour communication between professor and students online being stored at a repository for students to access such content at any time.
By the end of the critical stage of Covid-19, Universidad CEU Cardenal Herrera will prepare a specific schedule to make-up lessons lost specially those practical educational activities.
All services are still focused on students, especially on those who as they come from abroad or live in other autonomous communities, are confined far from their homes. Through the intranet, email and “Alexa, open CEU”, the digital assistant Alexa by Amazon, university students can reach these services.
Universidad CEU San Pablo
The platform used is Blackboard Collaborate thanks to which students follow the class in real time. And to ease the work between teachers and the administration staff and services, the most common tools are Teams, Forms, Flow or Sharepoint.
In order that teachers may be more efficient at work, they have created “Aula Abierta” a space where professors from the three CEU universities can solve doubts about the nearly 50 digital ambassadors.
Moreover Universidad CEU San Pablo has taken a leap with online examinations which means a real “e-learning” as many universities used to e-learning already had in-class examinations.
Some days ago, the University overcame this new challenge with the first examination to access the Degree of Medicine online. A total of 733 candidates were examined using facial recognition proctoring technology that guarantees student identification while doing tests.
Students had to take pictures before the exam and during the test the system guaranteed that there was no identity fraud because the system itself made the facial recognition during the whole examination.
Universidad Abat Oliba CEU
The adaptation of CEU UAO to the online environment is based on the Blackboard platform implemented last year and the update of knowledge and skills in the use of online tools. For streaming lessons we have resorted to the extension BlackBoard Collaborate Ultra.
Each teacher responsible of a subject has prepared an Adapted Work Plan presenting the content, objectives and gives an idea of contents.
The efficiency of the tool Microsoft Teams has allowed nearly the whole staff to move the activity to their homes. This Microsoft 365 app students have access to, had already proven that it could become a good option for distance learning.
