Abstract
The paper presents the results of a students’ survey carried out at “Vasile Alecsandri” University of Bacau, Romania, on the quality of educational process on online platforms in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study was addressed to students from the Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Physical Education and Sports. The results of survey highlighted that most of students were satisfied with the measures taken by the university during the lockdown period and the way the teaching—learning-assessment process took place. However, some negative aspects were reported as: lack of an adequate infrastructure for some students, less effective teacher-student communication and interaction, impossibility of performing practical applications, lack of socialization, lack of learning motivation, less objective examination (e.g., possibility of cheating), possibility of physical and mental health degradation (e.g., too much time spent in front of screens, installation of a sedentary lifestyle). Consequently, for the new academic year, effective, and efficient measures must be implemented by the management of the university to remove, as much as possible, these negative issues and to improve the performance of online educational process.
Highlights
Education is “a fundamental human right, a global common good and a primary driver of progress across all the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the 2030 Agenda as a bedrock of just, equal, inclusive, peaceful societies” [1]
University of Bacau during the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure the continuity of the educational process were sufficient and effective (Figure 1) and only few of them (4 students from FPSE first year and 2 students from Faculty of Engineering (FE), third year) stated the opposite
We believe that even the neutral responses betray a lack of communication. This “short circuit” felt in the teacher-student communication may be caused by the students’ lack of learning motivation, that, as the results show, obtained the lowest score
Summary
Education is “a fundamental human right, a global common good and a primary driver of progress across all the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the 2030 Agenda as a bedrock of just, equal, inclusive, peaceful societies” [1]. In the higher education sector, universities have been forced to close the doors in response to the growing coronavirus outbreak and, where the IT infrastructure allowed, switch classes to online learning to keep students’ retention and maintain access to learning [8]. According to a survey carried out by the International Association of Universities (IAU) from 25 March to 17 April 2020, two-thirds of higher education institutions were able to move teaching online while one third could not [9]. Teachers did not necessarily have the appropriate skills so that they could suddenly and shift from face-to-face to online teaching and often resulted in “learning by doing” or imitating the face-to-face
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