Abstract:

On March 11th, all educational institutions in the Czech Republic were closed due to the COVID-19 epidemic outbreak. With no immediate prospect of reopening, all the schools affected were forced to switch from classical learning schemes to distance learning. After the summer break, in September, the second wave of the pandemic started to rise, a few days before the start of a new academic year. Once again, the government decided that universities should switch to distance learning. In this paper, we analyze this unexpected change in education style in a particular case of two parallel undergraduate courses – Mathematics for Economists (MFE) and Mathematics for Informatics (MFI) – taught at the University of Economics in Prague, Czech Republic.

The MFE and MFI courses are compulsory one-semester introductory courses in mathematics offered to students of all five faculties of the University of Economics. In the affected summer term of 2019/2020, resp. winter term of 2020/2021, there were 842 students enrolled in the MFE course, resp. 1219 students enrolled in the MFE course and 478 students enrolled in the MFI course. In both semesters, the students were divided into lecture groups (of approx. 200 students) and recitation groups (of approx. 25 students with classroom time dedicated mainly to brief theory review and then practicing computations and problem-solving). The author of this paper was the teacher of eleven of these recitation groups.

Teachers of MFE opted for various distance learning methods ranging from streaming real-time lectures and running recitations through video calls to preparing worksheets for students’ self-study. The author for this paper decided to use the MS Teams platform, uploading short video-lectures in Khan Academy style tailored for the MFE course and answering student’s questions via chat or in discussion threads, effectively resulting in a course format resembling many MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) courses.

In this paper we focus mainly on the students’ experience and behavior in this course format. The fact that in the summer term the forced change of education style happed during the fourth week of the thirteen-week semester allows us to compare the experience of classical learning scheme with one of distance learning. We also compare the experience of the students affected in summer term with that of those affected in winter term, most of whom did not yet have a chance to experience face-to-face learning at the university level.

We gather data by:
1) analyzing students’ behavior in the team, making use of MS Teams analytical tools,
2) gathering students’ feedback from discussion threads, emails, and chat,
3) series of anonymous questionnaires distributed to students.

Despite this research being in preliminary stage, with winter term of 2020/2021 still in progress, we believe even the initial findings in this area are worth presenting as soon as possible, as the whole world of education is presently experiencing a major change due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with potentially long-term effects. While these are hard to predict in the current situation, all the findings, even the most preliminary, might help us understand and prepare for whatever yet awaits us.

Keywords:

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