Perception of Advantages/Difficulties of Remote Teaching During Covid-19 Pandemic: Results From a Survey With 3000 Italian Engineering Students

Abstract

On 11 th March 2020, the Director-General of The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. From this date, in Italy as in most parts of the world, life dramatically changed in many aspects: smart working and remote teaching became familiar words, while students and teachers at all educational levels, from primary school to university, had to face sudden changes and new challenges. Emergency remote teaching became widespread, and new methodologies to deliver classes and courses were adopted by educational institutions.In this paper, we focus on the impact of the remote learning experience on university students, in particular, engineering students enrolled at Politecnico di Milano. Subjects recruited from all engineering courses, from the first to the fifth year, were asked to fill in a multidimensional survey. Respondents participated in the study voluntarily and more than 3,000 students completed the entire survey. Overall, 60 items about the participants' perceptions about the challenges of emergency remote teaching, compared with the pre-Covid-19 usual in-presence teaching were included.The survey addressed 6 dimensions: Organization of the emergency remote Teaching, Subjective Well Being, Metacognition, Self-Efficacy, Identity, and Socio-Demographic information. Preliminary results show significant differences in the students' perceptions concerning the following three factors: the effectiveness and the organization of the courses, the change in the university students' evaluation of their instructors, and the change in the university students' perception of difficulties in the switch from in-presence instruction to online learning. Data analysis also suggests a relevant impact of an emergency remote teaching on students' perceived Metacognition and Self Efficacy.

An Extensive Questionnaire about Metacognition during Emergency Remote Teaching Involving More Than 3000 Engineering Students

“…Question 11 was scored negatively by almost 2500 students, while questions 2 and 3 were both scored positively by about 2000 students. The mean values and the medians for questions 2, 3, and 11, as in [30], confirmed these significant differences, while, in general, we observed that the mean value for the items overall was just below the neutral value of "3/5" on the Likert scale that was used in the questionnaire.…”

“…At first glance, three clear higher bars can be observed in the two histograms. Question 11 was scored negatively by almost 2500 students, while questions 2 and 3 were both Table 2 shows the mean value, the standard deviation, and the median referring to all the questions from 2 to 14, as we computed in a previous work [30]. At first glance, three clear higher bars can be observed in the two histograms.…”

“…In the following graphs (Figure 2), the score distributions referring to remote teaching are reported and are grouped into negative and positive scores. Table 2 shows the mean value, the standard deviation, and the median referring to all the questions from 2 to 14, as we computed in a previous work [30]. At first glance, three clear higher bars can be observed in the two histograms.…”

An Italian Large Case Study on Emergency Remote Teaching: Factors and Predictors Which Affect Higher Education Students’ Attitude

“…To investigate the learners' opinion about ERT and its effects on these students, we adopted a survey method and created an ad-hoc questionnaire which was administered online in July 2021, at the end of the second term of the academic year 2020-2021. Submitted to both Politecnico di Milano bachelor students (B) and master's students (Ma), this questionnaire consisted of 66 items pertaining to 6 different constructs, as illustrated with more detail in previous studies (Mazzola et al, 2022(Mazzola et al, , 2023. The overall number of learners enrolled on Architecture, Design and Engineering who participated voluntarily in this survey, was 3,920 and they gave explicit consent to use the collected data for research purposes.…”

The Paris Conference on Education 2023: Official Conference Proceedings

“…To investigate the learners' opinion about ERT and its effects on these students, we adopted a survey method and created an ad-hoc questionnaire which was administered online in July 2021, at the end of the second term of the academic year 2020-2021. Submitted to both Politecnico di Milano bachelor students (B) and master's students (Ma), this questionnaire consisted of 66 items pertaining to 6 different constructs, as illustrated with more detail in previous studies (Mazzola et al, 2022(Mazzola et al, , 2023. The overall number of learners enrolled on Architecture, Design and Engineering who participated voluntarily in this survey, was 3,920 and they gave explicit consent to use the collected data for research purposes.…”