Abstract:

The most important program in schools of business is often the MBA program. Students admitted to the MBA program come from very diverse backgrounds and career experiences. The pandemic that affected the lives of many people since March 2020 has had some impact on several aspects of work, studying and teaching. Professors had to learn and adapt quickly to new forms of delivery of courses. Most of them have used Zoom for the first time.

Some courses like the Analytics course taken in the first semester of an MBA program, is already frightening for some students if their background is not quantitative and their uneasiness vis-à-vis the subject, will not go away but may be exacerbated during a semester where the pandemic changed so many things and may have added to the stress. The course is normally offered using a blended teaching approach where face-to-face classroom lectures were complemented with online support. During the 10th week of the winter semester, professors had to quickly changed their teaching approach, learn new technologies and use a complete online delivery method.

In this paper, we review which aspect of the learning components have been viewed differently in this time of pandemic using a survey questionnaire administered to students in an Analytics course as part of an MBA program in December 2019, prior to the pandemic and in May 2020 during the pandemic. Some levels of confidence and motivation have been observed to decrease and the perception of certain pedagogical tools as contributing to the enhancement of higher order thinking skills and team building skills differ in many instances. The experiential learning component of the course has also been valued differently in this challenging time.

Keywords:

Attitude, perception, higher-order thinking skill, team-building skills.