European STEM Higher Education Responses to COVID Pandemic

In the last decades, Higher Education has undergone an ever-increasing trend of digitalization. Universities have already been working for years on adapting to the digital era, with new technologies and increased accessibility driving educators towards adopting new teaching methods. In this context, the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic enforced changes that would have taken years to happen in just a few months. Now that digital education is no longer optional, universities have been urged to adapt to an online environment, using a wide variety of approaches.
This book aims at centralizing all the scattered knowledge that has been generated in the emergency-focused response to the pandemic, to turn it into a collection of best practices for educators and STEM universities. This study was run on a pool of 50 universities from 28 countries, by conducting interviews and workshops with students from each institute, analyzed through content analysis and thematic analysis techniques. These interviews covered 5 main areas: Teaching methods adapted to the online environment; Digital tools used for online lectures; Online laboratories; Online assessment methods; Personal interaction between students or students and educators in an online environment. The book finally recommends techniques that educators can use to create a more effective and digital-enhanced learning experience for their students, with the right balance of digital content and in-person interaction. It also advises actions that universities can take to support educators in achieving this goal, and to digitally enhance interaction between their students and educators