A forced migration due to covid19 from a face-to-face university education service to a total online learning management system support: UDELAS-Panamá study case

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic forced the Specialized University of the Americas (UDELAS, Panamá) to transform their educational service from almost 100% face-to-face to 100% virtual in approximately three weeks. This change involved creating 2,500 virtual courses and integrating nearly 9,000 students and 1,200 teachers into them. The research question to answer: Is it possible to schedule a proposed Learning Management System (LMS) tested on the go, in two effective months to institutionally can adopting latter an effective teaching-learning process total online? For testing which LMS online service to choose, two types of well-known LMS were selected: Moodle, which is an open source LMS centralized with a complete control over its components and services, and Google's Classroom, as a decentralized LMS running essentially in the cloud, which is conducive to a user/personal management, avoiding in the short term, to attend many hardware and software technical issues. Under a methodological process alike Agile style, the expansion of technological capabilities in the Moodle implementation took three weeks. In parallel, to implement Classroom, 12,000 institutional Google accounts were generated using the G Suite for Education license (in agreement with Google Mexico chapter). An institutional email account was established as the digital identity of professors and students, throughout they can access both LMSs. In addition, a group of the professors chose to combine applications instead of using Moodle or Classroom alone, it was called the combined option.