Abstract:

The extraordinary epidemiological situation introduced during the COVID pandemic and the subsequent lockdown necessitated a general change in the field of education in general. Education in Bulgaria as part of this global process is no exception, especially in the field of higher education, where the transition to e-learning and the training itself in some universities had to be done in parallel.

This article presents and analyzes the practical results and outlines the trends obtained during three semesters of e-learning - summer 2020 and academic year 2020/2021 in two Bulgarian universities - UNIBIT and University of Mining and Geology "St. Ivan Rilski”.

A significant difference between the two universities is the fact that while UNIBIT has a 10-year tradition in distance and e-learning, in MSU it was used by only a few departments and had to first prepare most of the teachers to be able to conduct e-learning training.

The common denominator between the two universities is the platform they used for e-learning Moodle, as for MSU an additional Classroom was introduced, and for UNIBIT BigBlueButton.

The analysis of the obtained practical results and the tendencies proposed by the authors are based on a survey of over 500 students from both universities in the educational qualification degree "Bachelor". Emphasis in the survey and the proposed trends is placed on the introduction of educational games (gaming) and related virtual reality, which significantly improves the perception of educational material and the results obtained in all studied disciplines in the field of engineering and IT sciences. The tool for realizing the planned analyzes, which will be used in the article, is the statistical software product of IBM SPSS.

Keywords:

Results, trends, e-learning, gaming, higher education, IBM SPSS.