Abstract:

More than two years have passed since our daily life changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It had a very serious impact on everything including the educational systems worldwide and forced changes in the teaching and learning system. These changes also impacted the University of Zilina and the distance teaching influenced the mathematics education as well. Since big majority of study programs here are technically oriented, quality of the mathematics education is key.

All the educational institutions and schools were closed down due to the pandemic and were forced to transition to distance forms of teaching. All the graduation exams including the mathematics were either completely cancelled or postponed to a later date. They were resumed in the second year of the pandemic but after students returned to schools it was obvious that the gaps in their education were big. This also showed in the exam results of first year students as well as the older students.

Our article focuses on how the students of the University of Zilina in the mathematics classes perceived these changes. Their study programs are based on mathematics therefore these changes had a significant impact for them. We created a questionnaire where we gathered feedback, both positive and negative, from the first year students coming from high schools as well as the older ones regarding their views on the distance-based education.

We are currently working on a way to incorporate the positive aspects based on their responses into the daily presence-based educational process and so we will be able to increase the quality of teaching mathematics in the University of Zilina.

Keywords:

Educational process, mathematics education, positive and negative of distance education.