The Application of Flexible Teaching as a Response to Twenty-First-Century Needs: Experiences in Building Materials Subjects

Abstract

The global COVID-19 pandemic prompted the urgent adaptation from face-to-face to complete online teaching, with a shift towards a more active and participatory student-centred teaching model. That online teaching period led to a more flexible face-to-face model, which put to good use virtual resources to incorporate different supplementary interactive and motivating learning activities to help students to acquire knowledge and competences progressively and meaningfully. This paper shows how these activities have been integrated into the Building Materials subjects taught in the Degree of Technical Architecture at the Universitat Jaume I (Spain). After describing the different subjects, their activities, and teaching methodology, the paper focuses on the specific case of the Building Materials III subject, whose complete online teaching during the state of alert led to more teaching materials being created for autonomous learning. Examples of supplementary proposed activities are provided, and students’ response, their degree of satisfaction, and follow-up are analysed and correlated with acquired learning. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.