Abstract:

In March 2020, all the universities in the Czech republic were forced to make an unexpected transition from face-to-face to distance learning. At the Prague University of Economics and Business that transition happened during the summer term so that the students affected by this change had the chance to experience both the classical face-to-face learning and the largely improvised distance learning. In the academic year 2020/2021, Czech Republic experienced more waves of the epidemic. The restrictions on face-to-face learning during various periods throughout the academic year differed and at times allowed for the students’ presence in classrooms. Nevertheless, many of the students of the Prague University of Economics and Business have never personally attended the lectures during that academic year.

In this paper we focus on the students of the course Mathematics for Economists (MFE), a compulsory undergraduate mathematics course, and compare two runs of the course – summer term of 2019/2020 and summer term of 2020/2021. In the first run, students experienced the transition from face-to-face to distance learning. In the second, the whole course was taught online, but unlike in March 2020, the both the teachers and the students already had some experience with distance learning.

We compare the students’ experience with distance learning during those two terms based on three main sources of data:
1) the students’ behaviour in the MS Teams platform that was used for distance learning,
2) the students’ feedback from discussion threads, email, chat etc.,
3) an anonymous questionnaire that was distributed to students in both the terms.

We focus on how the different experiences (the unexpected change versus the “new normal” of distance learning during the pandemic) has changed the students’ experience.

Keywords:

Distance learning, coronavirus, COVID-19, mathematics, undergraduate.