Abstract:

New challenges require new approaches and this pandemic period isn’t any different. It created or accelerated the context for rethinking the way information is delivered and received in most of the traditional domains, by embedding old approaches into a virtual new mainstream. The transposal of the physical context into the virtual one reshaped the way authority is perceived and if in many cases, mainly for those who already relied onto an equitable spread of responsibility between the participants, the transition was facile and without repercussions, in some cases the disappearance of a physical authority figure created the premises for the decay of the system.

Although nowadays in regards of education, even the most skeptical societies understood the importance of face to face interaction to fulfill the desiderate of an educational act, for a considerable period, since the outburst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the only accepted method was online virtual interaction under the form of asynchronous or synchronous meetings without even having the possibility of physical meetings.

Unfortunately, not all domains can be easily adapted to the online environment in these conditions and the domain of physical activities is one of them. The present research aims to identify if simple anthropometric measurements and fitness tests, that should be a part of everyone’s physical culture because they were covered in physical education lessons during school years, could be easily integrated into an online asynchronous and synchronous evaluation system and moreover if an intervention program could be carried out and be accounted for modification of fitness parameters.

A group of 73 students from the Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania was included into this study and has been initially evaluated for somatic parameters and functional tests tied directly to the fitness state of the human body: flexibility, muscular endurance, muscular strength, cardiovascular endurance and body composition. The experimental period consisted of 93 days (09.11.2020 - 09.02.2021) that stretched across three different moments in a student’s life: courses period, winter holidays and exams period. The intervention exercise program developed especially for this research lasted 30 minutes and was in accordance with the recommendations of World Health Organization. The final evaluation has been done exactly on the same parameters as the initial one and data processing was done with the aid of SPSS software.

Keywords:

Online education, evaluation, fitness.