Abstract:

In the beginning of the pandemic in Europe, all academic faculty across universities were forced to switch their teaching from a traditional approach, to a new one based on e-learning technologies. One of the recognized critical points in this transition was students’ involvement to courses. This point is more related to the synchronous way of delivering the courses, which is considered as the most class-like approach. Of course, it was not the only approach adopted by university professors as many had chosen to organize their classes in an asynchronous way. For most Higher Education Institutions (HEI) the second semester of the Academic Year (AY) 2019-2020 was devoted to facing the emergency, experimenting new solutions. In the first semester of the AY 2020-2021, most professors had to do online courses again.

The scope of this paper is to examine the way professors, who adopted a synchronous approach and use it again in this semester, intend to improve the learning experience of their students (and their own teaching experience) regarding students' involvement. This latter is a key element in all learning processes and it is a critical element in standard face-to-face lessons: getting feedback in a 100% on-line environment can be challenging for those who are not used to.

For this study three key aspects of involvement were enlightened:
- students’ feedback
- not-communicative support behaviours
- assessment.

To explore these aspects a survey was conducted to the faculty of Italian and Greek Universities, however, it was open to other countries’ professors as well.
Emphasis was given to pedagogical strategies in using technologies during their classes following the idea to stress users’ needs and analysing what kind of solutions they have adopted.

The survey was divided into several questions targeting the collection of different information related to both students’ and professors’ experience on the execution of the new way of education. More specifically, the survey analyses students’ experience and discusses how professors dealt with the new challenges emerging from online education.

The majority of answers in the survey come from professors belonging to Sapienza University of Rome and to National Technical University of Athens, however colleagues from other universities have also participated in the survey. This indicates the emerging interest related to the online learning from Higher Education Institutions (HEI).

Keywords:

Online education, students' feedback, assessment methodology, Higher Education Institutions.