Teaching courses to STEM students: Lessons learned from the Pandemics

The current pandemic has been having a huge effect in teaching at all levels. Particularly, in Portugal, for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) students attending Universities and taking high learning degrees, it was particularly harsh. Nevertheless, the teaching crisis triggered by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was fertile terrain for pedagogical experimenting, learning and growing. In a previous work (Chibeles-Martins and Afonso, 2022) the authors described their experience during three eventful semesters teaching Applied Mathematics courses to STEM students. In this work the authors present several teaching practices that were firstly introduced during the aforementioned period as an emergency patch-up but revealed to be so curiously thought provoking that caused them rethink how courses were taught before the Pandemic versus how they should be effectively taught. The authors explore how these teaching practices had to be readapted to a face-to-face teaching situation with the Lockdowns’ end and what were their effect on students’ learning experiences in a post-pandemic environment. In class and home-work assignments; working and discussion groups; lectures by students; more dynamical MOODLE pages, filled with on-line asynchronous activities; and more diverse evaluation moments are some of the practices that will be described and explored though out this presentation.