Abstract:

In the period of extension of the COVID-19 pandemic a new unexpected situation occur, which had to be coped with by the whole Slovakia and also the university mathematical education. It was a new challenge for teachers as well as students how to handle the university mathematical education in the distance form when schools and universities were closed, and the full-time study was changed immediately to distance education. Online and email communication became the only possibility of communication between teachers and students. Some electronic study materials had been developed before, therefore there arose the opportunity to utilize them, improve them, and complete them by new multimedia elements.

On 9 March 2020, the emergency situation was announced at the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra and the full-time form of education was interrupted. The educational process continued further by the method of self-study. Therefore there originated the necessity to create the new electronic study materials needed for the self-study of the students, and similarly to consider the subsequent forms of online and distance examinations. The process of creation of the new electronic study materials itself and setting up the environment for testing required a lot of time, effort, and independent study also of the teachers because they came across many online environments for the first time just in this period. The electronic communication and examination were pursued by the different means, provided by LMS MOODLE and Microsoft Office 365, predominantly Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Forms.

The objective of the paper is to evaluate the new trends and approaches in the university mathematical education during the period of extension of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the paper, the samples of the created electronic study materials will be presented by demonstrating approaches to how university mathematical education was in progress for the period of extension during the COVID-19 pandemic. We will compare and evaluate statistically the results of the examinations from the previous years when testing was performed in the standard full-time form with the personal presence of students and the exam results from the current academic year with the examinations in the distance form without the personal presence of students at the exams.

Keywords:

University mathematical education, COVID-19 pandemic, self-study, distance education, examination.