Abstract:

Traditional approach to teaching is often associated with its face-to-face, in-class modality in which teachers assume the dominant role of the ones who transfer knowledge onto their students. In recent years, in the Croatian educational system, there has been significant effort to place students and their needs in the centre of the educational process, mostly through the nation-wide curricular reform and large-scale (re)education of teachers at all levels of the educational system. Such a student-centric setup is characterised by contemporary approaches and methods of teaching and learning (e.g., problem solving, research, discussion, etc.), and, in part, by appropriate use of modern information and communication technology (ICT) and other media.

With its appearance in early 2020, the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic was the cause of significant changes in the educational system of Croatia. The widespread lockdown that followed meant that teachers at all educational levels had to transfer their classes into the digital world and make changes to their teaching methodology and approaches so they fit the requirements of online education, regardless of whether they were ready for it or had appropriate skills to do so. Such a drastic shift also entailed that they had to select and employ various pieces of software as well as ICT services in order to organise distance teaching and learning, enable communication with the students, set up evaluation tasks and carry out testing.

The paper at hand presents a selected subset of results from a large-scale research into the attitudes and practices of Croatian teachers and students related to online education during the lockdown period in Croatia (mid-March to mid-May 2020), with a special emphasis on the use of software. The research was conducted on a large number of participants (N=7568), from all three levels of the educational system, using a specially-designed, digitally-administered questionnaire. There are three research questions specifically targeted in the paper: (1) how widespread was the use of software by the teachers and were there cases in which teachers did not use digital technology at all to carry out educational activities?, (2) which software was used by the teachers at particular educational levels and for what purpose?, and (3) were there cases of software use that reveal new or unexpected usage patterns?

Keywords:

Online learning, distance learning, ICT in education, contemporary teaching approach, software.