Abstract:

The paper studies the impact of online and goal-oriented teaching in an IT Applied in Social Sciences course, taught in the first year of the BA level, during the academic year 2021-2022, and compared with the previous academic year 2020-2021. During the present academic year, we enhanced the course with more goal-oriented inputs, referring to the students’ future employability and the utility of the course assignments in this respect, as well as with more interactive features, mainly regarding online team tasks implemented with Room discussions and frequently implementing concept synthesis.

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 spreadsheet analysis, a Wordpress website and a team work research assignment on e-activities. We addressed the teaching challenge of ensuring interactivity in an online manner and adequate evaluation tools in the online environment in a previous paper (Andreica, 2021). We compare student results and feedback obtained in the current academic year, characterized by enhancing goal-oriented principles and interactivity, with the ones obtained in the previous academic year.

We briefly overview the course characteristics, which have been described in previous papers. For the student feedback analysis, we used the data provided by the official UBB teacher evaluation tool - AcademicInfo system. The results obtained in the academic year 2021-2022 are compared with the ones obtained in the previous academic year 2020-2021, first year of online teaching (with results discussed in a previous paper).

As an online teaching platform, we used MS Teams (like in the previous academic year). In order to ensure interactivity, we as well encouraged and requested the students to use the share content facility for sharing the practical tasks that they had to work on, in order to reach the course’s 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. These issues have been extensively analyzed in a previous paper (Andreica, 2021).

Regarding the goal oriented principles that we have enhanced within the present academic year, we constantly revealed the usefulness and impact of the practical assignments students were working on. In the last course, we had an invited speaker from a company, who presented employability issues and how students could better prepare for their employment interviews. In this framework, we emphasized how students could use the practical assignments we have been working on during the course for their employability portfolio.

Consequent to computing the final the grades, we compared them with the ones obtained in previous academic year.

Using UBB’s teacher evaluation tool, students have graded the course with an average of 4.47, higher than the one obtained in the previous academic year - 4, on a scale 1-5, where 1 is very poor and 5 is very good. Students expressed a general positive feedback towards the course content, the acquired knowledge, the usefulness of the practical 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 very good rating of the course

Keywords:

Online learning, interactive learning, goal-oriented learning, practical assignments, basic IT course, online evaluation, student feedback, teaching IT concept.