Abstract:

One of the ambitions teachers may have is success in supporting their students in becoming good professionals and responsible and happy persons. Therefore, the teachers often wish their students to be present and active throughout the whole teaching.

The pandemic, among other obstacles, added to the requirements of the teachers to achieve functional communication with the students from the beginning of every subject, to the end of the exam, with the acceptable level of confidence that the accomplished competencies are to remain functional through the working lives of the students.

Some of the teachers insist on having the cameras switched on through the lectures so that they could check on the students’ expressions and invite them more easily to ask questions and give comments. If the students’ groups are larger, this does not help much, so the students must be encouraged in other ways to get involved. The overall behavior of the teachers and preparation of well-tailored tasks allow the development of mutual trust and add elements of play so that the students commit to studying.

At the Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, at the time of our partial lockdown, we used Teams as the space for our lectures, and we used LMS Merlin for our homework, tests, and written exams. The paper describes experiences acquired through these new conditions. Fortunately, the preparations for online teaching started as soon as it was understood that epidemic was spreading quickly.

We raised to a new level already developed questionnaires given as Google Forms or short tests at the end of each lecture. Such mini-tests were used to give information to the teacher on the success of the lectures. In the new forms, online forms gave more time to the students to search for the answers or to evolve their understanding of the topic. Having regular checking of this kind gives both the teachers and the students insight into the success of the teaching and studying and allows adaptation and deepening where necessary or welcome.

Students have always been invited to stop lecture with questions etc., but these forms also required students to estimate the speed, the volume, the new content share, especially after the first several lectures, and overall quality after every lecture, provoking comments and suggestions.

Questionnaires open for all the students on the institutional intranet at the end of the subject, and additional Google forms for more details after the grades were given, were used to estimate the quality of the teachings.

On the results of the statistical analysis of these results, in comparison with the results of the final exams before and during the covid epidemic, we give conclusions on the efficiency of the online classes and materials given by teachers, the utility of the online tests, and overall quality – to be used after this crisis and in new normal teaching.

Keywords:

Online classes, quality of teaching, communication with students.