Abstract:

Humankind is once again witnessing the true eternity of Heraclitus thought on the permanency of nothing, but a change. The social shift caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly changed all aspects of our societal lives from the ground up, in a way globally never witnessed before in our history.

The shift has undoubtedly favoured and fastened full implementation of digital technology into different aspects of social lives we lived prior to the pandemic outbreak resulting, among the other crucial elements of the life as we know it, in the total suspension of classroom instruction in Croatian higher education system.

Complete summer semester classes of the 2019/2020 academic year in Croatian academic community took place online, with the exception of the first two weeks in March. About one half of the teachers at the Polytechnic in Pozega immediately switched their lessons to LMS, while the other half continued to communicate with students by email to both distribute instruction and teaching materials.

In order to check the students' perception towards the newly imposed teaching model a survey was conducted in June 2020 encompassing 944 survey questionnaires, about 59 LMS courses and 49 ad hoc online courses during the online teaching model conducted. The LMS used was Moodle.

The research itself consists of three main parts. The first part, focused on the topic of student satisfaction with the courses conducted, uses non-parametric methods to analyze the difference between the two online teaching models used, namely the structure and interestingness of the course, the difficulty of the course and the usefulness of exercises and seminars, the availability of literature and usefulness of the course in general. A statistically significant difference was found in three of the six main areas research has covered.

The second part of the research includes an analysis of exam pass and dropout rate considering the availability of structured or ad hoc online teaching. In this part of the study, no statistically significant difference was found between the groups.

Finally, the influence of the amount and variety of materials available on the LMS on course satisfaction was investigated. LMS administration report files and data from the survey have been used in this part of the research. Amount of available materials mostly do not have a statistically significant impact on the usefulness of the course, but students do not like too many materials. The same results were found in regards to a variety of available materials.

Keywords:

COVID-19 pandemic, e-learning, online education, Moodle, higher education.