A simple but efficient concept of blended teaching of mathematics for engineering students during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

We present a simple but efficient concept for the realization of blended teaching of mathematics and its applications in theoretical mechanics that was conceived, tested and implemented at the University of Trento, Italy, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The concept foresees traditional blackboard lectures with a reduced number of students present in the lecture hall, while the same lectures are simultaneously made available to the remaining students via high quality low-bandwidth online streaming. Based on our first assumption that traditional blackboard lectures, including the gestures and the facial expressions of the professor, are still a very efficient and highly appreciated means of teaching mathematics, this paper deliberately does not want to propose a novel pedagogical concept of how to teach mathematics, but rather presents a technical concept how to preserve the quality of traditional blackboard lectures even during the pandemic and how to make them available to the students at home via online streaming with adequate audio and video quality at low internet bandwidth. The second assumption is that the teaching of mathematics is a dynamic creative process that requires the physical presence of students in the lecture hall as audience so that the professor can instantaneously fine-tune the evolution of the lecture according to his/her perception of the level of attention and the facial expressions of the students. The third assumption of this paper is that students need to have the possibility to interact with each other personally. We report on the necessary hardware, software and logistics, and on the perception of the proposed blended lectures by students from civil and environmental engineering at the University of Trento, compared to traditional lectures and also compared to the pure online lectures that were needed as emergency measure at the beginning of the pandemic.