Abstract:

The paper presents an empirical analysis of students' performance on the same courses held in the first semester 2019 (before the COVID-29 pandemic) and on the first semester of 2020 (with pandemic limitations). The analysis is conducted on approx. 200 students that followed the same course "Project Management" (approx. 40 students) and two courses "Information Systems" (approx. 140 students), and one course on "Social and Security aspect of Data Science (approx. 20 students). Courses were held by the same professors (the authors) and were very "traditional", i.e., teachers using the same textbook, the same contents, syllabus and slides both in the courses before and during the pandemic. This situation stimulated our curiosity as a unique occasion to compare face-to-face versus online teaching, thus investigating some general questions about the performance of e-learning. We have collected data about students' feedback on the courses, their performance in terms of grades, and some other indicators about face-to-face vs online courses.

What emerged is the following:
a) students' overall performance on the courses have no significant variation before and during the COVID;
b) students were more interactive in remote sessions rather than in face-to-face sessions held the previous year;
c) the background of students (Economic, Engineering and Computer Science studies) seems to be unrelevant in terms of familiarity with the ICT tools and, in general, respect to the appreciation of e-learning;
d) the availability of sophisticated, mature LMSs did not impact on the appreciation for the platform used by teachers: platforms that are not full-fledged LMSs, like Google Classroom™, MS Teams™ or Zoom satisfied did what has been requested.

These empirical but robust results raise some challenging questions: is the usage of LMSs crucial in e-learning, or is a videoconferencing tool enough? Is the quality of academic performance directly correlated with face-to-face lectures? Is digital literacy an obstacle to this level of e-learning usage? In this paper, the authors will try to answer these questions by analyzing the results of empirical data collected and will set other questions that need further investigation.

Keywords:

Distante learning, pandemic.