Abstract:

Currently, due to the COVID_19 pandemic the world has shut down and higher education institutions (HEI) were among the institutions that had to change their traditional way of lecturing classes.

Traditional classes, lectured in a classroom where the teacher and the students were together and face-to-face face were no longer an option, due to effective lockdown. Portugal was one of the countries that had to pursue solutions to maintain educational institutions functioning, in order to maintain students studying and learning and to be able to minimize the effects of the pandemic.

In this context, this study describes a particular case in the north of Portugal, in a school of the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança (IPB), a higher education institution that had to close the facilities during the second semester of the academic year of 2019/2020. During this semester the classes were all online, using the zoom platform.

The importance of this study, was not only to understand the impact of online classes in the students, in terms of availability of resources to follow classes, motivation, knowledge acquisition, and evaluation, but also to present measures to the school management so they could prepare and prevent problems with a possible 2nd lockdown. This 2nd lockdown did happen during the second semester of the academic year of 2020/2021.

From the study, we concluded that not all the students had the basic conditions to attend online classes, either they did not have a personal computer or they had internet limitations. Also, they reported that, being at home, was harder to follow the classes and to study since their families required much more of their time to make other chores.

The major findings were that not all the students understood online classes the same way, in fact, older students from advanced years preferred online classes and had no restrictions on their relationships with their colleagues. However, the younger students, enrolled in the first year, and this was transversal to all courses, felt that they did not acquire the needed knowledge, found online classes harder, and, since they were freshmen, a considerable percentage reported that they could not establish social connections with their colleagues and felt demotivated and alone.

Also, the majority of the students reported that the evaluation was harder, since the teachers, to prevent fraud and make cheating more difficult, reduced the evaluation time and blocked the possibility to see the entire exam, only allowing one question at a time. This was a complain from the students and a valid one, since it only negatively impacted the engaged students, it had no evidence of reducing fraudulent behaviours.

With these findings it was possible for the HEI’s management to implement some measures. The HEI had to be closed for the first half of the second semester of 2020/2021. Still, as soon as it was possible to return to face-to-face classes it was established that some years could be in hybrid mode (online and onsite), however not for freshmen years. This measure would enable them to form social connections and to properly follow the classes with a closer support by the teacher. The other measure implemented was that all evaluation was onsite, hence the good students were not affected and it could also efficiently prevent fraud, when compared to online evaluations.

Keywords:

Online education, students relationships and motivation, online evaluation, online knowledge acquisition.