A university experience with academic peers in the time of a pandemic time

Abstract

Social actions that contribute to facing the consequences generated by the pandemic of COVID-19 in the educational field are increasingly required. One of the actions taken in Mexican university spaces consisted of having an academic peers program that supported student learning through a digital platform. The objective of this study is to describe the experience of academic and counseled peers who have participated in a program with a service-learning approach, based on a technological environment, during the time of the pandemic. The action-research methodology was used because it allows us to make a contribution to educational change. According to the results of semi-structured interviews with 131 academic peers, the experience has been mainly challenging, enriching, innovative and focused on service. Most of the 452 counseled peers who responded to a survey about the service received expressed both gratitude and admiration. As part of the service experience, 19,607 academic consultancies were offered from February 2020 to June 2021. We concluded that academic peers have had to further develop their technological skills, social leadership and creative response in their ways of teaching.