Abstract:

It's been a year since our daily lives changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It caught us unprepared, yet determined, flexible and active. The coronavirus has hit the educational system as well. The situation in education is more complicated than ever before. As a result of anti-epidemiological measures, schools have shifted from full-time teaching to distance learning overnight. For many, live has changed dramatically. Combining family life, work assignments and school responsibilities cost many great amount of effort. It all came completely out of the blue and students, parents and teachers stand in highly demanding positions, part-time students especially. In order for teachers and students to succeed in this form of teaching, they need to feel satisfied and comfortable in their work. Schools, universities and other academic institutions should create the best possible working conditions for them so that they can put the maximum into their work. However, how many teachers had the necessary equipment, software or training to be able to teach fully online? Within a few months, the overlooked problem of educating marginalized groups and a generative poverty also emerged. Children, students without computers, the Internet or mobile phones, are being cut off from education. Is this just?!

The pandemic has brought about a radical change in learning and teaching. It is precisely this change that we wished to understand by looking at the key players in this transformation, the students, the teachers, and in our case, the mathematics teachers. We therefore decided to ask them about how they were and still are managing this situation. We also wanted to observe and analyze the mathematics teachers’ behavior in our country and we propose a study of the teaching methods and conditions of teaching. We had to adapt our research methodologies and research questions to this particular situation. As mathematics educators, we attribute great importance to the knowledge at stake. We based our study on a questionnaire that has been sent to students and teachers of mathematics.

As countries evaluate when and how to reopen schools safely, one key question is how schools will support learning and its recovery. During school closures, some students continued to learn through various remote modalities, such as online learning platforms but others stopped learning altogether. When schools reopen for in-person education, students will return with very different levels of knowledge and skills, with disadvantaged students most likely to exhibit the greatest learning losses.

One part of this paper is a survey, through which we asked not only teachers but also students (full-time and part-time) of university in Žilina many questions about distance learning. We qualitatively analyzed the collected data. Our aim was to evaluate the survey and to find out the positive and negative aspects of this form of the distance teaching and learning. We were also dealing with an analysis of conditions of teaching so that not only students but also teachers are as comfortable as possible. Our goal is also to draw attention to the problems related to the need of digital transformation of schools, economics or state administration. Digital literacy is one of the basic skills today, and we are still groping for it, because we do not yet have a universal plan to deal with this contemporary problem.

Keywords:

Education, distance teaching and learning, digital literacy, survey, pandemic, university students and teachers.