Is Romania Prepared for eLearning during the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Eduard Edelhauser,Lucian Lupu-Dima

doi:10.3390/su12135438

Abstract

Today, Romanian universities largely have eLearning platforms generally based on the most popular Moodle-LMS platform or on the most popular collaborative educational platforms designed by Microsoft and Google, which contain mail group modules, virtual classes, video conferencing, presentation and testing. In the context of the pandemic generated by COVID-19, the authors tried to investigate the way in which Romanian society has managed to face this challenge in the field of education. The events followed one another very quickly, and the first thing that crashed was the medical system, quickly followed by the economic environment and then, obviously, education. The authors’ research methodology was based on the interpretation of the results of a questionnaire composed of 19 questions and applied to a population of 200 respondents. The survey period was only 24 h, between 29 April 2020 at 1 p.m. and 30 April 2020 at 1 p.m. The investigated population, the respondents, were students of the University of Petroșani undertaking bachelor and master studies for the academic year 2019–2020, but the study could be extrapolated to the Romanian education system.

Highlights

Even if virtual education has been a concern of the educational system and implicitly of the management of educational institutions in the past, in the context of the pandemic generated by the COVID-19 virus, virtual education has become a challenge for the education system but for the society as a whole
Even if they answered at a rate of 86% that they were involved in eLearning, this is an inaccurate result because it was demonstrated in Q11, Q12 and Q13 that student involvement in eLearning was lower
In the statistical analysis performed by the authors, it was demonstrated that the survey conducted in April was validated by the teachers’ options during May; even the university leadership would have opted for face-to-face testing or for the use of a Moodle eLearning platform

Summary

Introduction

Even if virtual education has been a concern of the educational system and implicitly of the management of educational institutions in the past, in the context of the pandemic generated by the COVID-19 virus, virtual education has become a challenge for the education system but for the society as a whole. In the period 2010–2020, the performance of virtual education has reached impressive levels. It is well-known that Virtual Education was another name used for eLearning but referring more to electronically aided learning conducted without any face-to-face components. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the whole education system has changed from a classical education system to an online education system based on eLearning. ELearning is much more than virtual education, and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it became a social phenomenon What became eLearning in the last ten years? eLearning is much more than virtual education, and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it became a social phenomenon

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion