Abstract:

On 11th March 2020 the Director-General of The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic [1, 2]. From this date, in Italy as in most parts of the world, life dramatically changed in many aspects [3]: smart working and remote teaching became familiar words, while students and teachers at all educational levels, from primary school to university, had to face sudden changes and new challenges [4]. Emergency remote teaching [5] became widespread, and new methodologies to deliver classes and courses were adopted by educational institutions. In this paper, we focus on the impact of the remote learning experience of university students, in particular, engineering students enrolled at Politecnico di Milano. Subjects recruited from all engineering courses, from the first to the fifth year, were asked to fill a multidimensional survey. Respondents participated in the study on a voluntary basis and more than 3,000 students completed the entire survey. The survey featured about 60 items about the participants’ perceptions about the challenges of emergency remote teaching, compared with the pre-Covid-19 usual in-presence teaching ”. The survey addressed 6 dimensions: Organization of the emergency remote Teaching, Subjective Well Being, Metacognition, Self-Efficacy, Identity, and Socio-Demographic information. Preliminary results show significant differences in the students’ perceptions s concerning the following three factors: the effectiveness and the organization of the courses, the relationships with the instructors, the difficulties due to online learning modality. Data analysis also suggests a relevant impact of emergency remote teaching in student’ perceived Metacognition and SelfEfficacy. Further results will be discussed at the conference .

References:
[1] World Health Organization. (2020, March). Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) – World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019
[2] World Health Organization. (2020, March 11). WHO Director-General’s opening remarks at the media briefing on COVID-19—11 March 2020. https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---11-march-2020
[3] Aristovnik, A., Keržič, D., Ravšelj, D., Tomaževič, N., & Umek, L. (2020). Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Life of Higher Education Students: A Global Perspective. Sustainability, 12(20), 8438. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12208438
[4] UNESCO. (2020, April 1). Education: From disruption to recovery. UNESCO. https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse
[5] Hodges, C., Moore, S., Lockee, B., Trust, T., & Bond, A. (2020). The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning

Keywords:

Remote Teaching, distance learning, covid-19, Metacognition, SelfEfficacy.