Abstract:

Before Covid-19 online learning was one possible learning option, next to the widely used traditional in-person learning, during the lockdown it became a necessity for universities to continue their educational activities. This paradigm shift has generated changes in students' and educators' ideas about learning/teaching, as this kind of teaching is significantly different from what has traditionally been used over the last centuries.

The introduction of online education during the lockdown was virtually overnight and most of the students and teachers were not prepared for it. This fact is confirmed by a survey conducted by the School Education Gateway at the beginning of the pandemic, which shows that 66.9% of respondents were using online platforms for teaching for the first time.

The lecturers of the University of Debrecen - who used the Moodle system on a daily basis since 2015 - were partially prepared for the transition to online education, as they have been using blended learning.

The Moodle groups of Introduction into logic and computer science and Foundations of Artificial Intelligence subjects offered a significant amount of digital content even before the pandemic. The presentations of the lectures were available by default, moreover online tests for practice and exams were available for both subjects.

Logic is taught in the fall semester, so the preceding summer was enough to make the necessary preparations for online education. The powerpoint files could be considered as a sketch rather than a complete material, they lacked the solution of problems and the detailed explanations. Several aspects had to be considered. There was a finite amount of time to make the necessary handouts. Creating good quality instructional videos is very labor intensive and students’ attention wears off after a few minutes if it is not suitable for their own pace. Therefore narrated presentations were made for Hungarian students, whilst in the English programme short, concise videos were created along with their respective transcripts, as a significant portion of freshmen have language barriers. The weekly tests written on papers during seminars were replaced with online tests based on the practice tests, with relatively long deadlines, to make achieving a successful solution accessible to everyone.

The AI course was affected by two waves of the pandemic in the two semesters. In spring, it hit teachers and students completely unprepared. At that time, we wrote narratives for our previous presentations and recorded up to 10 minutes long instructional videos presenting solutions of practical problems, often working from morning to midnight. Most of the students were not able to take part in online meetings. Hence the lecturer was online during the lecture to chat with the students, and questions asked at other times were answered within one day. In the fall semester, when all the necessary equipment was obtained, lectures and practicals were held online and recorded for students not able to be online during the allocated time. The students rarely took the opportunity to interact at this time.

At the end of the semester, we conducted a survey in which we asked students how challenging online education was for them, which kind of handouts they found useful, and which educational method would have been ideal for them. In our article, we describe exactly which study materials were prepared for which subject and the results of our survey.

Keywords:

Pandemic education, computer science, e-learning.