Comparison between face-to-face and remote learning for teaching automatic control systems

This paper presents a comparison between face-to-face and remote teaching of a university level course on automatic control systems. A set of learning activities is proposed to teach and evaluate the course. These activities aim to strengthen problem solving, teamwork, communication and self-learning skills. The activities were developed using the interactive learning applications: Matlab Grader, Matlab Live Scripts, Google Classroom, Google Meet and Google Docs. A survey applied to students who took the course face- to-face in 2019 and remotely during 2020 showed the advantages of the remote approach for most aspects of each of the skills mentioned. However, students perceived that their contribution to teamwork was greater when they were in a physical classroom. Course grades improved by an average of 10 % for the remote modality.