THE INFLUENCE OF COVID-19 ON TEACHING-LEARNING ACTIVITIES: IS THERE NO COMING BACK WHEN THE PANDEMIC IS OVER?

Posing unprecedented and unforeseen challenges to the educational system globally and across all levels, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic worked as a powerful catalyst in the innovation of teaching practices. In many cases, online and extended classrooms offered the chance to revise the course pedagogy to accommodate lockdown measures, quarantine, and social distancing. Meanwhile, the pandemic may foster better constructive alignment among the intended learning outcomes, teaching-learning activities (TLAs), and modified assessment strategies — or altogether innovating an existing course. Moreover, the employment of active TLAs may cope with the lack of motivation and involvement that sometimes labels online education. This work sets in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) higher education framework. The connection between innovative teaching before the pandemic and how COVID-19 affected traditional teaching methodologies is approached by discussing tools and their drivers. Strengths and weaknesses are pointed out, including the TLAs and examples of relevant pedagogical frameworks tools are involved in or based on, respectively. A novel approach to discuss the adoption of tools along a four-axis domain (space, time, user activity, and interaction) is presented. Finally, implications in a short-time horizon scenario characterized by extended classrooms and the changes that could be irreversible in the long run are addressed.