MOTEMO-OUTDOOR: Ensuring learning and health safety during the COVID-19 pandemic through outdoor and online environments in higher education

Abstract The restriction measures posed notable challenges for formal teaching-learning processes in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic since they had to be adapted to guarantee health security. An active learning programme applied to three environments (indoor, outdoor, and online) was tested on 273 undergraduate university students in an a within-subjects experimental study. Each student was assigned to two indoor and two outdoor seminars, and a subsample (n = 30) also participated in online seminars due to the university's lockdown protocols. The learning experience and learning conditions were evaluated through six dimensions: learning, evaluative impact, hedonic experience, technical conditions, environmental conditions, and health safety. The results suggested that outdoor was more effective than indoor in the learning experience, with greater differences in hedonic experience, but indoor scored better than outdoor in the learning conditions, with a greater difference the environmental conditions. No differences were found between online and face-to-face environments in the learning experience, despite online had better scores in the learning conditions. It is concluded that this adaptation through active methodologies to both outdoor and online contexts allows overcoming technical, environmental, and teaching limitations and improves health safety, guaranteeing the learning experience, and thus providing with flexibility the teaching-learning processes.