Abstract:

During the outbreak of the pandemic COVID -19, education was also affected in many countries. The switch from traditional to online schooling began with no preparation time for teachers or students and the necessary information technology (IT) preparation for online education. Therefore, informatics education and Informatics teachers became essential for online education. In the Republic of Croatia, informatics has existed as a separate school subject since the early 1990s in elementary and high schools. Since then, informatics teachers have been educated following specific university curricula to acquire the requested qualifications. Besides, systematic school digitalization in Croatia started in 2017, encompassing both teachers' and students' educational and technical requirements. Following the school reform, Informatics became an obligatory school subject in fifth and sixth grades and an elective school subject in other grades in elementary school (from 1st to 4th and 7th to 8th grades) in Croatia. Consequently, the transition to online schooling probably encountered fewer problems than in countries without informatics curricula and formal informatics teachers' education. We conducted the research during online education in the school year 2019/2020 among 4451 elementary and high school students. The participants voluntarily and anonymously took the survey designed to determine a) students' attitudes towards online education; b) difficulties during online education. In this paper, we present our findings that can serve as a guideline for the future of online teaching.

Keywords:

Informatics, school students, online education, COVID-19, attitudes.