Abstract:

The paper compares face-to-face and distance learning teaching for an IT Applied in Social Sciences course, taught in the first year of the BA level, during the academic year 2022-2023, and compared with the previous academic year 2021-2022, which unfolded online. Since 2021-2022, we enhanced the course with more goal-oriented inputs, related to students’ future employability and utility of the course assignments and acquired practical skills. In the present academic year, we had faculty alumni as course guests at the beginning of the semester.

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 data analysis, a Wordpress website and a team work research assignment on e-activities, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.

We briefly overview the course characteristics and the resources prepared on the faculty’s e-learning platform, 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 - AcademicInfo system. The results obtained in the academic year 2022-2023 are compared with the ones obtained in the previous academic year 2021-2022, which comprised online teaching. Online teaching results are discussed in a previous paper (Andreica, 2022).

As an online teaching and videoconferencing platform, we used MS Teams for the distance learning students and as blended learning tool for the courses supplementary delivered to the classical student group. In order to ensure interactivity for distance learning students, we encouraged and requested the students to use the share content facility for sharing the practical tasks that we worked on, in order to reach the course’s skill development goals. Students who were actively involved, as discussed 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).

We compare the student evaluations for the face-to-face and distance learning student groups within the academic years 2022-2023 and 2021-2022 and student grades. We note that distance learning students are more autonomous in approaching learning than face-to face student groups.

Using UBB’s teacher evaluation tool, face-to-face group students from the studied specialization have graded the course with an average of 3.96 in the academic year 2022-2023 and 4.47 in the academic year 2021-2022, on a scale 1-5, where 1 is very poor and 5 is very good. Distance learning students have graded the course with 4.17 in the academic year 2022-2023 and 4.75 in the academic year 2021-2022. Students expressed a general positive feed-back towards the course content, the acquired knowledge, the utility of the practical assignments, including the team research assignment on e-activities, the link with future employability perspectives and the online teaching methods, leading to an overall very good rating of the course.

Keywords:

Face-to-face and distance learning, online learning, interactive learning, goal-oriented learning, practical assignments, digital skills, student feed-back.