Impact of Covid-19 on UPC's Moodle platform and ICE's role

Abstract

On March 13 2020 all the Spanish population got confined at their homes, except for those working in essential jobs. For the universities, this meant to go fully online overnight, which presented a number of challenges on the operational, didactical, and pedagogical levels. This paper is about how the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and, particularly, UPC's teacher commitment reacted to the situation, making a series of decisions and actions in almost every dimension of the university activity, as seen from the point of view of the Institute of Sciences of Education (ICE), the entity in charge of the training of the professors and the management of the Learning Management System (LMS) of the University based on Moodle. This LMS plus the G-Suite, which was deployed to professors and students in just one week, became the backbone of the Virtual Learning Environment(VLE) that the University had to rely on to complete successfully the academic course. The paper takes a quantitative approach, feeding on the data logs of the VLE and making a statistical analysis.