The changes in private universities in Puerto Rico to face the Covid-19 pandemic and impact as little as possible the offer of courses are here to stay, even when efforts continue to regain normality in person, which, as they understand, will no longer be the same.
This is stated by university officials consulted by EL VOCERO, who assured that in the midst of the first quarantine measures on the Island – which are considered the most severe – private universities did not stop offering their classes. They indicated that the concept of distance education is more widely developed at the university level than at other educational levels on the Island, and that gave them some advantage to face the emergency since March 2020.
“Universities have never closed, distance classes have always been offered in line with executive orders,” said Carmen Cividanes, executive director of the Association of Private Colleges and Universities (ACUP), which groups together 14 institutions with a total enrollment of more than 220,000 students.
Even though the universities affiliated to the ACUP assume some actions and strategies in a consensual manner, each one of them can develop its own actions and strategies to attend the specific needs of the university community they serve. For example, the University of the Sacred Heart (USC) has maintained its academic offerings mainly through remote transmissions, and has other offerings in person.
“The bulk of the courses are being offered in a hybrid format, or live via videoconference. We use the ‘ZOOM-Sagrado’ platform, which has been very effective for us, ”said the vice president for academic affairs, Jorge Silva Puras.
According to Silva Puras, in the academic programming for the semester that began this week, courses will be offered following the five teaching modalities established for the first semester of this academic year. Three of the modalities are mainly virtual and two with formats that include face-to-face sessions on campus.
They diversify the type of classes
More specifically, they have flexible face-to-face classes, where the teacher teaches the course from the classroom and is transmitted as a videoconference, but there are a number of students —adjusted to health protocols— present in the classroom who rotate their assistance with other students on different days. In the flexible hybrid modality, 50% of the course is offered flexible face-to-face and the remaining 50% online —the class file can be accessed at any time— through the portal mi.sagrado.edu.
In virtual hybrid mode, half of the classes are offered as video conferencing and the other half online. The other two class formats are entirely online, or entirely as videoconferencing.
Silva Puras reported that since last Tuesday, January 19, when the semester began, all classes are offered on “a“ video-face-to-face ”platform that allows students to interact with their teachers and classmates.
For his part, the vice president of academic affairs at the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico, in Ponce, Leandro Colón Alicea, pointed out that there are cases in which academic discipline requires face-to-face teaching, such as nursing programs, therapies medical and culinary arts, among others.
“In those cases, practice laboratories are required, in which we manage small groups, where students alternate in person and remotely,” explained Colón Alicea.
“For the moment we are going to continue giving the courses combining the typical ‘online’ with remote face-to-face until it is determined if the conditions (of the pandemic and quarantine) change,” said Colón Alicea, in addition to emphasizing that this was the strategy teaching that was followed last semester.
The vice president for academic affairs also pointed out that the university offers students all services — counseling, enrollment, orientation, psychological or spiritual assistance, among others — from virtual classrooms.
For the nursing program —one of the disciplines that face-to-face teaching requires— the Central University of Bayamón (UCB) continues to use simulators for the training of future health professionals. These simulators are mannequins that simulate a human being, from the skin to its internal organs, and are capable of programmatically reproducing the different health conditions that a human being may suffer.
“Every day it is more difficult for hospitals to allow access to students – however, a number of hours required by the program’s accreditors are met – so we use simulators so that the student can have all the skills to compete in the world of work, ”said Ángel Valentín, president of the UCB.
“We cannot, through a computer, teach a student to draw blood. We have a simulator where the student learns to take the pulse of the blood to identify where the artery is passing through to take the blood sample ”, explained Valentín.
Greater technology in institutions
As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the UCB acquired programming (software) that offers the functions of “a virtual hospital to which the student connects and can practice some of the skills” of the discipline.
According to Valentín, in the cases of nursing laboratories and other disciplines, the number of students per session has been reduced by rotating for different days of the week.
“We are not 100 percent face-to-face in any program… We have searched the internet spaces, looking for individualized alternatives for students, trying to fulfill our humanistic-Christian mission of providing them with an education of excellence without forgetting the human being who has forehead, ”Valentin pointed out.
As in the private universities reviewed, Caribbean University has also assumed the modalities of online, hybrid and limited face-to-face classes. According to Ana Cucurella, president of Caribbean University, the institution received federal funds from the Cares Act with which online laboratories were established for the different academic programs, such as science, engineering, nursing, among others.
“There are some disciplines that may be working with health measures as we have done for the technical-vocational education division: barbershop, cosmetology, therapeutic massage, etc. Those boys came and came to the laboratory with everything conditioned by the measures against Covid-19 ”, explained Cucurella.
Measurements are here to stay
Despite the fact that the measures and strategies that universities have put into practice to fulfill their teaching functions were forced at the beginning of the pandemic, university executives seem to agree that several – if not all – are here to stay as part of the university experience future.
“I think we have learned a lot from this situation in terms of how technology can help us provide a better education for our students. These (new) platforms will allow us to have a quality of face-to-face teaching in the classroom, in addition to integrating new alternatives for teamwork among students, and classroom materials that a student has not been able to access and services to students ”, anticipated Silva Puras.
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