Abstract:

Physical activity is crucial for the modern individuals, which unfortunately nowadays experiment a slightly active towards sedentary lifestyle. Physical education courses, due to the fact that they are present in the curricula of all educational levels, bear an extremely important role into society. Long term speaking, through educating present generations and raising awareness on the importance of balancing workload with activities that imply physical movement, we will have a chance to a better health and life. World Health Organization (WHO) recommends for adults (18-64 years old) at least 150 minutes of weekly physical activities of moderate intensity (64%-76% of the maximum pulse).

The present research proposes to address the problem of efficiently organizing, conducting and evaluating an online course of physical education for students, starting from the recommendation of WHO regarding the minimum time necessary of weekly physical activities and the parameters of physical fitness, but without involving any additional acquisitions from behalf of the students or university, being them software of hardware. An essential criteria in choosing the tests and exercise program for this research was that they should be easy to self-administer without prior knowledge and to be conducted in the comfort of each one’s home with own body weight, without the need of additional equipment.

The experiment was comprised of two evaluations, initial one on the 09.11.2020 & a final one on the 09.02.2021 and an experimental period of 93 days, all being done exclusively online on the Microsoft Teams platform, for which the Babes-Bolyai University had a license. The study group was comprised of 155 students from the Business Administration line of study of the Faculty of Business from the aforementioned university. Synchronous weekly meetings have been held, according to their time schedule, but additional support was offered anytime through the internal chat option.

The final questionnaire had 29 questions of which 10 were open type ones, offering thus the students the possibility to express their opinions in relation with aspects of interest included in the statements of questions, such as: diseases during monitoring, changing eating habits, motivation for performing physical activities, perceived level of self-esteem and how they relate to peers, positive and negative aspects generated by the pandemic situation. The last question asked the students to offer me feedback on the method of conducting the course and represents the main database for the present study.

For data processing we’ve employed text mining techniques using the IBM SPSS Text Analytics for Surveys software. The software in question is especially designed for identifying and extracting concepts from qualitative data, being often used in specialized studies. It not only makes an assignment to a certain category based on word examination, but also analyses syntactically and morphologically the unstructured text based on advanced algorithms and extracts feelings, establishes relationships or classifies them. Basically, this approach will give us a deeper understanding of the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of our subjects in conjunction to the utilized method for teaching, monitoring and evaluation described.

Keywords:

Satisfaction, text mining, online education, physical education, COVID-19 pandemic.