Abstract:

The aim of the paper is to sum up experiences and attitudes of lecturers across departments of organisation and management in Croatian public universities during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how it reflected on the quality of the teaching process but also on the interest of students. The public universities were facing challenges during lockdown and pandemic restrictions primarily in organisation of teaching process and related activities. Instead of traditional face-to-face education, universities had to implement the online platforms that facilitate teaching process. Problem was that the infrastructure of Croatian universities is mostly outdated, so the use of new models for virtual education was one of the larger experiments that Croatian higher education has faced. Our proposition is as follows: the faculty in the departments responded very effectively to the challenges of the new form of teaching and designed new, improved forms of communication and work with students and created preconditions for a radical irreversible step towards a new model of education that will become a hybrid way of working. Reality after the pandemic ends. Data for the research will be gathered through a survey questionnaire and will include scholars from the departments of organisation and management across nine Croatian public universities. The parameters to determine which difficulties in teaching the course providers face, what is their experience comparing post-covid and pre-covid in the context of teaching and what is the level of overall satisfaction and motivation in the observed period will be defined upfront. In addition, we present some good practices that are the result of a distant way of education, and which the departments want to keep in the post-pandemic era.

Keywords:

COVID-19, higher education, management, organisation, virtual education.