Impacto del cambio de enseñanza presencial a virtual en la salud mental de estudiantes de Administración en Salud de la Universidad de Córdoba durante la pandemia COVID-19

Abstract

The SARS-CoV-2 virus, known as Covid-19, caused people to make changes in the way they carried out their activities for their precaution and to mitigate their contagion according to the biosecurity protocols established in the pandemic. One of these changes was the teaching process in educational institutions, where e-learning was adopted. Despite the resilience to this, the perception of the students of the Health Administration Program (PAS) to the change from synchronous face-to-face to virtual meetings and how it impacted their mental health and academic performance was unknown. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the impact of the change from face-to-face to virtual teaching on the mental health of the students of the Health Administration program at the University of Córdoba during the Covid19 pandemic. The type of study was descriptive transversal with a quantitative approach, the population consisted of 341 students from V to X semester. The technique used was the structured survey, whose questionnaire was composed of 32 closed questions. For the analysis of the information, descriptive statistics with absolute and relative frequencies and crossed tables in Microsoft Excel software were used. As results, it was found that 79% of the students are between 19 and 25 years old, belong to stratum 1 (86%) and almost half of them study and work (48%). The most used platform for the teaching-learning process was Google Meet (30%), followed by Whatsapp, which was also used for communication with classmates (97%) and teachers (87%). More than half managed to adapt to the virtual classes and 75% perceived that they did not present alterations to their mental health during the virtual teaching-learning process; however, they expressed feeling stress in situations such as not understanding the topics in classes, lack of social interaction with classmates and low academic performance. It is believed that it has a good handling in the use of TIC, promotes better experience in the virtual classes as a teaching methodology, whereby it is recommended that this means be encouraged 15 as a strategy for improving the constraints in the management of digital tools, without knowing the possible levels of stress that can cause them in the students if not moderately used, In addition, for future studies, it is suggested to involve teachers to understand this situation from their perspective.