Abstract:

The paper studies the impact of online teaching in an IT Applied in Social Sciences course, taught in the first year of the BA level, during the academic year 2020-2021. The course covers basic IT and Internet services characteristics and principles, as well as the most important moments in IT evolution and practical tasks regarding spreasheet analysis, a Wordpress website and a team work research assignment on e-activities. The teaching challenge consisted in ensuring interactivity in an online manner and adequate evaluation tools in the online environment. We compare student results and feed-back with the ones obtained in previous years.

We briefly overview the course characteristics, which have been described in previous papers. For the student feed-back analysis, we used the data provided by the official UBB teacher evaluation tool, which is included in our university’s academic information system AcademicInfo. The results obtained in the academic year 2020-2021 are compared with the ones obtained in the previous academic years (which have been analyzed within previous papers).

The course educational materials are available on the faculty’s moodle e-learning platform. The course content and issues regarding previous systems were detailed in previous papers.

As an online teaching platform, we used MS Teams. In order to ensure interactivity, we encouraged the students and requested them to use the share content facility in order to share the practical tasks that are included in the course syllabus, in order to reach its skill development goals. In this way, all students could benefit from the shared work. Students who were actively involved, as discussed with them from the beginning of the course, were granted certain points of bonuses for each intervention.

We envisioned the acquiring of the practical skills as working together during the online seminars and afterwards online grading them, using te same share content facility. Therefore, the practical requirements were continuously covered during the course.

The theoretical content of the course was evaluated using an online quiz developed in moodle, based on the content previously developed in Access. The questions and answers were updated.

Consequent to computing the final the grades, we compare them with the ones obtained in previous years, in face to face interaction and blended learning and e-learning tools. The bonuses had a very stimulative impact on students.

We analyze the results obtained by the students in the academic year 2020-2021 and we compare them with the ones obtained along the previous academic years, discussing the impact of the online teaching and interaction bonuses. The course feed-back results were very good, with an increase of the number of higher grades.

Using UBB’s teacher evaluation tool, students have graded the course with an average of 4, on a scale 1-5, where 1 is very poor and 5 is very good, similar to the ones obtained in previous years. Students expressed a general positive feed-back towards the course content, the acquired knowledge, the assignments they have worked on, including the team research assignment on e-activities, and the online teaching methods, all these aspects leading to an overall good to very good rating of the course

Keywords:

Online learning, interactive learning, basic IT course, online evaluation, student feed-back, teaching IT concepts, educational impact.