Abstract:

The paper presents the study conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic in the second semester of the 2019-2020 school year on the impact of quality characteristics of e-learning platforms on user satisfaction (efficiency of student training and teacher satisfaction) in pre-university education in Romania.

After a brief presentation of the current state of the evolution of e-learning, in section II we dealt with the evaluation of the quality of e-learning systems defining six quality characteristics of the platforms that were taken into account in our study, namely: Moodle, 24Edu , Google Classroom and Adservio.

Quality features are: Accessibility (defines how to access the platform), Stability (feature that takes into account the platform malfunctions),User Friendly Interface, User feedback, Ease of working with uploading materials and Efficiency of the platform in the training and the student satisfaction.

We also introduced in the study the grade (mark) given by the user, which we will use to assess the efficiency of the platform. It is a grade from 1 to 5 given by the user (students and teachers).

The research was conducted on the basis of questionnaires distributed to students and teachers, and the data were processed using the Overview Mathlab application. A total of data was collected from 809 users of the platforms (140 teachers and 669 students). The quality characteristics were evaluated by the respondents with ratings: I do not know (1), unsatisfactory (2), satisfactory (3), good (4), very good (5) and then used to calculate a score that takes into account the grade, number these grades in relation to the total number of respondents in each category (students or teachers), for each platform. The score thus calculated was introduced into the study in order to be able to homogeneously analyze the results.

The results are listed in four tables and illustrated by two graphs.

The platforms used in pre-university education in Romania can be divided into two categories, namely:
- 1. Platforms used on a smal scale (Adservio, Moodle);
- 2. Platforms used on a large scale (24Edu, Google Classroom).

The research highlighted the fact that the four platforms, the most used in pre-university education in Romania, were developed more carefully for one of the target groups (Moodle and Google Classroom for teachers, and Adservio for students).
The 24Edu platform is well appreciated by both students and teachers.

The authors did not propose a ranking of the analyzed platforms but only highlight some quality features that have a significant impact on the efficiency of online training.

Keywords:

e-learning, quality, evaluation.