From traditional to home-confined learning: a case study in a school involved with ICT

Abstract

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic affected all aspects of daily life overnight, worldwide. In education, academic systems had to frantically switch to an online format. Teachers and students had to face an unknown situation, with difficulties as isolation, technology management and pedagogical approaches. However, this impact can be drastically reduced for schools with strong previous background in information and communication technologies (ICT). We reached this conclusion by objectively quantifying the learning results in a sudden transition from face-to-face (F2F) to distant learning (DL). We focus on the abrupt home confinement experienced by the Maristak Durango school during the COVID-19 outbreak. As revealed by the statistical analysis related to the grades of the 360+ students (VET, High School) who went through this F2F to DL transition (F2F2DL), almost all students were able to retain and improve their grades. The results prove how a good ICT-based background can tangibly alleviate any radical F2F2DL shift brought by an unforeseen chain of events. This paper contributes to this type of analysis for VET, since there are hardly any studies related to this scenario.