Blended learning: new challenges for good education

Abstract

This research is framed in a full virtual institutional context due to the COVID-19 lockdown, and
in a curricular change scenario. In this teaching context, we had to approach the student’s reality
which was going through multiple changes. In that framework, students had a high level of digital
knowledge and lack of university experience. Therefore, the question was: How do we implement
a meaningful learning method that allows us to bring these two extremes together? Being
aware that answering this question is the new challenge of good teaching, we have developed
this article to show the results obtained from our experience in the virtual teaching of Public Law
during the year 2020, in the Promotional Regime, in the careers of Public Accountant, Bachelor
in Administration and Bachelor in Economics, at the School of Economic Sciences from the Universidad Nacional del Nordeste, Argentina. This study dates from the first pandemic year, when we observed that the student’s environment defied the objective of achieving significant learning. Due to the impossibility of developing face-to-face classes, virtual classes, also called remote face-to-face classes in this work, was implemented exclusively. This was a new experience that made us rethink the practices developed in teaching, to stand up for a constructivist pedagogical perspective of learning and to understand that technological tools were not only means to an end, but contexts that were facilitating the teaching-learning processes. Finally, we will demonstrate that, in this context, pedagogical mediation is the key to achieve a propriate educational design so is the element that provides dynamic tools within the teaching function.