Abstract:

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had many serious effects in various areas of life. One of the areas which have been seriously affected by the pandemic was education. Many governments have adopted nationwide or local measures to slow down the spread of the disease and such measures in many cases included even the closures of schools at all levels of the educational system. The effects of the pandemic on education may be measured and analysed in many ways. This paper uses the observations of the popularity of particular search terms in the Google Trends tool to evaluate the effects of pandemic in education. The first part of the paper provides a literature overview and then the Google Trends statistics on several education related search terms are reported. The search terms included in the analysis are "distance learning" and "online teaching" and the results show, that the frequency of searches using these terms has jumped approximately to levels four times higher than the levels usual in the times before the pandemic.

Keywords:

Online teaching, distance learning, pandemic, Google Trends.