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The dire circumstances presented by the COVID-19 pandemic have had a severely debilitating global impact on education, and led to an urgent transition from the onsite environment (OSE) to the online environment (OLE) for teaching and learning. In that regard, this paper describes the experiences of us and students of our involvement in oral and written tests in multiple software engineering-related courses during 2020 and 2021. The challenges encountered along with the interventions are discussed, and educational lessons based on the reactions and responses of the students are given. The results of a preliminary survey of the students of their learning experience in the OLE are presented and, related to it, the comments from the students highlighting their preferences of the OSE or the OLE are included. The test procedures, processes, and/or practices herein are, in principle, generalizable and potentially applicable to other courses in computer science or software engineering, during emergency remote teaching or even otherwise.

In this article we analyse the problem of emergence in its diachronic dimension. In other words, we intend to deal with the generation of novelties in natural processes. Our approach aims at integrating some insights coming from Whitehead's Philosophy of the Process with the epistemological framework developed by the "autopoietic" tradition. Our thesis is that the emergence of new entities and rules of interaction (new "fields of relatedness") requires the development of discontinuous models of change. From this standpoint natural evolution can be conceived as a succession of emergences - each one realizing a novel "extended" present, described by distinct models - rather than as a single and continuous dynamics. This theoretical and epistemological framework is particularly suitable to the investigation of the origin of life, an emblematic example of this kind of processes.

In this article we analyse the problem of downward causation in emergent systems. Our thesis, based on constructivist epistemological remarks, is that downward causation in synchronic emergence cannot be characterized by a direct causal role of the whole on the parts, as these levels belong to two different epistemological domains, but by the way the components are related: that is by their organization. According to these remarks downward causation, considered as relatedness, can be re-expressed as the non-coincidence of the operations of analysis and synthesis performed by the observer on the system.