Abstract:

Amidst the COVID pandemic, in March 2020, the fifth week of the second semester, the classes from the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies went from traditional to online. In this article, we analyze the case of the Databases classes, a second-year subject in the Cybernetics, Statistics and Applied Computing undergraduate program. It is a two-semester subject; for each semester there is a separate evaluation for which the exam weights 50% of the final grade and the seminar assessments the other 50%. In the 2019-2020 academic year, the first semester, including all the evaluations, took place onsite, respectively online for most of the second semester (typically Zoom based synchronous classes). For this paper, we have evaluated the results of the students (more than 200) to see if there was a significant impact of the switch from face-to-face to online. We also compared the second semester from the 2019-2020 academic year with the second one from the previous academic year which took part onsite. We also analyzed the feedback of the students for each of the semesters. The evaluation is conducted by the faculty for each subject. A rating scale multiple-choice questionnaire (eleven questions) can be filled out by each student for each part of a subject (lecture and seminar) before the final exam. There is also a twelfth question, an open-ended one where students can provide feedback. This evaluation is anonymous so we can’t link a specific evaluation to a grade. About 30% of the students return feedback and less than half of those provide an elaborated answer for the open-ended question. Even though the curricula differ from the first to the second semester, the two parts are heavily connected, many of the skills tested in the first semester exam are retested in the second semester one. The professors are also the same. We have used a mix of quantitative research methodology (e.g., paired sample t-test to see if there is a significant difference between the mean of the grades from the first and the second semester of the 2019-2020 academic year, independent sample t-test to compare the grades from the second semester conducted online in the 2019-2020 academic year with the grades from the onsite second semester of the previous academic year) and qualitative research (for analyzing the answers from the open ended-question).

Keywords:

online classes, face-to-face classes, results evaluation, data analyses