Abstract:

The whole world has been struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic for quite a long time, which has an impact across all sectors of human activities. In the field of education, this is inseparably linked to the transfer of full-time education to the online environment, being still a relatively new issue for both teachers and students, which requires the constant strengthening of digital skills, mastery of time management, self-discipline and suitable conditions to study. The paper focuses on how students of a selected educational institution deal with online teaching during coronavirus infection using the learning and communication platforms MS Teams and Learning Management System Moodle. Thus, the paper reveals what problems and challenges the academic sphere faces, specifically in students as direct participants of distance education. In this context, the aim of the paper is to find out, through subjective opinions using Likert scales, how students perceive the transition from conventional to distance education, in terms of technical equipment (connection to the Internet, technical skills to learn in an online environment), their motivation, perception of the difference between distance and traditional education, teacher's approach to teaching, integration of new forms of education, etc. The target group consists of 109 undergraduate students of the Institute of Education and Communication of the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, enrolled in bachelor's degree study programmes “Teacher Training in Practical Education”, and “Counselling and Guidance in Vocational Education”. The data collection was carried out in the winter semester, from October 2020 to December 2020. The data was collected using an online questionnaire and analysed by descriptive statistics. Based on the results, the answers are satisfactory in favour of adapting to learning in an online environment. It can be concluded that in most cases students do not have problems of a technical nature (77 %), nor with the Internet connection (80 %). Furthermore, new forms of education are perceived by the students as beneficial for the development of their personality (75 %) and professional development (72 %). On the other hand, the effects of the changed educational conditions suggest that these lessons learned in the transition to distance education should mean a substantial change in the curriculum and didactic approaches and innovations in the future, especially in terms of communication, motivation, and activation of the students.

Keywords:

Distance learning, tertiary education, student evaluation, flexibility, innovations, quality of teaching.