## 1 Introduction  
The advancement of information and communication technology (ICT) has opened up a viable solution for university teaching in the uncertain environment of the COVID-19 pandemic. The market offers several devices, such as smartphones and tablets, among others, which provide permanent connectivity for their users, and are becoming increasingly popular in the educational field [1].  
The use of these technological devices in education has given rise to the concept of mobile learning or m-learning, which benefits from new technologies and mobile devices [2]. Electronic devices and technology-supported teaching could enhance student learning [3], and modern smartphones have more data processing power than the big computers of a few years ago. The internet and cloud storage have profoundly changed the way many professionals worldwide work, creating a new way of working in schools and universities. It is advantageous for students to be taught from anywhere and at any time; it could help in acquiring competencies, as younger adults/university-age individuals use a greater breadth of technologies [4]. As [PERSON] and [PERSON] state in their paper [5], mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) belong to users, and are available to them around the clock, favoring the adaptation and access to content according to individual needs and competencies. However, with this study, the authors intend to confirm that technology is an additional tool to support traditional face-to-face teaching, providing better results as per the authors' experience.  
There is an added difficulty in specific engineering disciplines, i.e. manufacturing processes, which usually require extra effort by the students [6]. They tend to be subjects with extensive content, usually applied practically to solve real industrial problems. The measures that contribute toward acquiring competencies include improving online content and assessment, which reaffirms that teachers of this type of subject focus more on face-to-face teaching, although this way of learning and teaching is becoming increasingly obsolete [7; 8].  
At a professional level, and according to [9], there are numerous regulated professions equivalent to current engineering studies, which base their regulations on acquiring technological competencies and skills. Based on this premise, mobile devices must be included in the teaching and learning process, opening up a range of educational improvements that must be considered [10; 11; 12; 13], whether face-to-face or virtual methodologies are applied.  
Among other things, class time would be optimized, and student motivation would increase [14].  
In addition, technologies can simplify assessments by providing teachers with more immediate progress indicators, which are necessary in technical subjects or subjects with theories that need to be translated into practice for problem-solving (e.g., the engineering subjects discussed in this paper). Thus, many mobile applications on the market facilitate flexibility, communication, access to information, and the ability to create and assess content by students and teachers. This extensive development of educational applications is constantly evolving due to the demand generated by users [15].  
The authors carried out this comparison study based on their experiences, from two academic years, where all teaching methodologies proposed and permitted by the university were applied simultaneously, motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors analyzed two consecutive academic years (2019-2020 and 2020-2021) to obtain sufficient data and to affirm that there is a certain correspondence between the assimilation of competencies by the students measured through their results and the methodologies applied in teaching during the academic year. During the first year of this study, the methodologies used were predominantly technological and based on online learning and teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic.