Abstract:

It is generally acknowledged that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the necessity of rapid transition to distance learning has triggered the long-awaited digital revolution in education. Courses have been moved into the cyberspace using the institutions' e-learning platforms or a plethora of other digital applications and tools. Despite the myriad of possibilities to replace traditional “offline” sessions with their online versions, though, the level of demandingness in terms of addressing the challenges of school closures and the efficiency of the learning process within the particular subjects can be very diverse.

The present paper sheds the light on the feedback and recommendations of tourism students who study at Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra in Slovakia and had to tackle the difficulties connected with the sudden transformation of face-to-face lessons to remote learning during the first wave of the pandemic. In particular, the study investigated the efficiency of the university’s e-learning system in the case of courses which foster intercultural communicative competences in the English language. The online questionnaire survey was carried out at the end of the semester, after the two-month-long period of distance learning using the Moodle-based e-learning platform of the university, involving 157 tourism undergraduates. The findings of the investigation revealed that the majority of the respondents was satisfied with the efficiency of the e-learning system, as well as with their teachers’ readiness to provide distance teaching. However, in terms of the courses developing their intercultural and communicative skills a relatively considerable proportion of the respondents expressed that they missed the direct contact with the teacher and preferred on-campus to online learning. Besides, the paper also briefly points out some shortcomings of distance education using the given e-learning platform from the students’ perspectives, which could be used to improve the teaching/learning process.

Keywords:

Distance education, Moodle-based e-learning, intercultural communicative competences, English as foreign language, in-class learning.