Scope and limitations of audiovisual education during the COVID-19 pandemic

encounters and disagreements of university academic practices

Abstract

The arrival of COVID 19 implied an adaptation of all university courses to a virtual modality, a teaching that necessarily became mediated by technologies and its strategies had to be completely reconfigured by the educational system. Distance teaching implies promoting original and planned didactics, especially to be developed within the virtual environment. The purpose of this work is to present two teaching and learning processes of curricular units of the Bachelor of Communication (FiC-UDELAR) in the years 2020 and 2021 in which it is observed how the transformation processes achieved dissimilar results. While high levels of participation and adherence were achieved in the initial course Introduction to Audiovisual Studies, in the Audiovisual Content Laboratory Workshop (former Seminar Workshop Production for Television), aimed at more advanced students, the response was lower. Putting together, coordinated, combined and complementary between different disciplinary knowledge for the production of specific audiovisual content, are a fundamental part of this last practice; and this is where virtuality threatens academic training, because praxis and presence build affectivity, and this is a fundamental part of any collective creative process of audiovisual construction.