Abstract:

With the pandemic of COVID-19, online learning has become a part of everyday life for all students. If at first, it was a response to an emergency, now it is important to evaluate the success of online learning, particularly in such a fundamental area as mathematics. To assess students' satisfaction with mathematics online classes during Covid- 19 lockdown, a questionnaire was developed whose results reveal that satisfaction with this teaching model is positively correlated with the ease and comfort of the platform used, with the support provided by the instructor, and with the interaction created between these two actors. Moreover, it was concluded that the student's involvement and participation in the proposed activities is still a decisive factor in the satisfaction with these classes. On the other hand, distraction contributes to lower satisfaction rates. The linear regression results reveal that evaluation of the teaching-learning process is a general predictor of satisfaction with distance mathematics instruction, and that that the student's sense of motivation, the adequacy of the volume of work outside classes, and distraction are also predictors, in a more particular way, of satisfaction with this class model during the pandemic lockdown. This work contributes, in general, to the existing empirical studies on distance education and, in particular, mathematics education. This study is original, since there are few studies on this topic in a pandemic context in Portugal, so it is important to reflect on its effects in different contexts. On the other hand, this study addresses Higher Professional Technical Courses, as there are few studies on this type of higher education course.

Keywords:

Online learning, Higher education, Students’ satisfaction, Mathematics, Teaching-learning process, Covid-19.