A methodology to study the university’s online teaching activity from virtual platform indicators: the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic led Catalan universities to do all teaching and evaluation online from 11 March 2020 until the end of term on 30 July. Conventional universities made the transition to online teaching in just a few days and suddenly virtual platforms become the centre of interaction between lecturers and students. Data that were obtained from the virtual platforms gave extremely valuable information about what was being done in class. This paper analyses data taken from Atenea, the Moodle virtual platform at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), during quarantine. The key indicators and a data analysis design for Moodle have been proposed, which reveal teaching developments at various levels (overall and at the centre and subject level). This is applied to study data from the UPC Moodle and the results are discussed. The methodology can be extrapolated to other universities with Moodle platforms because the UPC is a set of small campuses and centres