Abstract:

Background:
On-line learning has been a buzzword in what concerns higher education and IT learning. However, several motives have prevented its full adoption by students and teachers. With the emergence of a pandemic situation in the second semester of the school year 2019/2020, it was necessary to implement and adopt draconian measures of confinement, that enabled the adoption of several on-line learning tools in "real time", changing (permanently?) the learning and the way teaching is performed.

Purpose:
The purpose of this study is to report the changes that were made in the syllabus of the "Management Information Technologies and Systems" taught to sophomore (2nd year) “general management” and “tourism management” course cohort at University X, with the introduction of remote learning tools and its alignment with the existing e-learning platforms and softwares available. Furthermore, an assessment of the student performance in each course cohort is made, when in comparison with the 2018/2019 cohorts.

Methods:
A qualitative and quantitative study was performed to evaluate the state of the art in how the subject of “Management Information systems and technology” is performed in leading universities, especially in those where remote learning is more advanced. A comparison between this state of the art is made when in comparison to the proposed syllabus presented in early 2020 and the changes that were made during the semester. Student uptake and use of the tutorials and tools were made, comparing the 2019 spring semester with the 2020 spring semester, in order to evaluate the changes in student behaviour and the final results obtained in each course cohort.

Results:
There was an overall positive impression of the students with the introduction of the changes induced by the pandemic. However, the comparison of the results obtained in each cohort with the previous year shown that a slight improvement in performance was observed between the two years analysed and within the two cohorts studied.

Conclusions:
In spite of the precarious conditions and the epidmiological context in which this work took place, it was possible to implement significant changes in the teaching methods and in the subjects approached, reinforcing the distance learning and chaning "on the fly" several aspects of the teaching protocol. Neverthless, and since the evaluation mechanism was similar to the one in the previous year, it was possible to compare the results that have shown a slight improvement in the final results.

Keywords:

Pandemic, MIS, cohort, Management students.