Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic brought many changes in several domains with a big impact on the future economic, medical and educational sectors. Everything changed worldwide after lockdown decisions. For this reason, new strategies shall be developed for all domains to cover also the possibility of new future pandemics. This research aims to provide some guidelines regarding the development trends to be considered for new educational online platforms. The paper starts with a summary of the Romanian educational system changes at the university level of studies after entering the lockdown period. Moreover, the paper surveys relevant educational science literature to propose the key functionalities for an educational online platform that meets both pandemic and students needs. A study regarding the expectation of these functionalities was conducted among the students of the Politehnica University of Timișoara. The interviews followed the Kano methodology and the research received more than 50 answers from students. These answers consist of the input for an analysis based on Kano and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) tool for discussing and determining the most relevant quality attributes expected from an educational online platform.

Keywords:

COVID-19, educational platform, Kano methodology, online education, QFD, Romanian students, students expectations.