Abstract:

With the development of the COVID-19 situation in Bulgaria, the newly accepted students in the autumn of 2020 had to switch to a distant form of education after only 6 weeks of face-to-face classes. This created many challenges for both the students and their teachers. Considering the pandemic is far from over it is important to investigate their opinion about the strengths and weaknesses of the educational methods used. To achieve this, a survey has been prepared and implemented, which includes different types of questions. First, the students were asked what methods of online teaching their teachers used – video conferencing, recorded videos, instructions in text form (PDF files, etc.), and e-learning sites. Then they had to assess the efficiency of each of the above approaches.

The next several questions were aimed at obtaining their opinion about their experience with distance learning. The students were asked if they were able to complete the assigned tasks and if they were receiving adequate help from the tutors. Finally, they had to assess the impact of distance learning on their motivation and future development.

The survey was done by 50 first-year students studying Software engineering, Computer science and Informatics, and information technologies in the business. The obtained results showed that the most used teaching methods were video conferencing and instructions in written form (PDF files, etc.), while the least used method was recorded video instructions. Out of the four methods, the students gave the highest score in terms of efficiency to video conferencing, followed by pdf files and e-learning sites. When asked if it was easy to execute the assigned tasks, most students were positive. However, some of them responded that the teachers were not able to provide adequate help in distant form.

The students were quite divided in their opinion about the impact of distance learning on their motivation. Similar results were achieved when asked about the expected impact on their future development as experts.

The full version of the paper will also present results from the statistical analysis of the survey, which is aimed at obtaining correlations between the answers of the participants.

Keywords:

COVID-19, higher education, students, distance learning, survey.