The last six months have been marked by the worldwide spread of the new coronavirus (COVID-19) which has triggered a global pandemic crisis. Thus, among the most affected fields of activity is education, educational institutions being forced to transfer all the curricular activities in the online environment, by using various digital tools and also Social Media. Due the rapidly spreading of the novel coronavirus, since the beginning of this year, thousands of higher education institutions around the world have been gradually constrained by local gouvernments and public authorities to replace traditional in-person educational activities with distance education, mediated by the digital environment. In turn, the Romanian educational system, as in the case of other countries, has been forced to respond promptly to the arising pandemic crisis challenges. Over the past decades, several researchers from various scientific fields have shown a growing interest in studying the ways in which technology (Marchello and Kelly, 1989), information and communication technology – ICT (Campbell, 2006; Aczel and Hardy, 2007; Saadik, 2008) or digital tools (Säljö, 2010) can be successfully integrated into curricular activities. Nowadays, all these contributions acquire a special significance, once the educational system has had to adapt, willingly or unwillingly, to the current context. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to present several results of an exploratory quantitative sociological research conducted between 26th of March - 20th of April  2020, at the Faculty of Philosophy and Social-Political Sciences, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, on a sample of 643 students. The main purpose of this research was to highlight the impact of the pandemic crisis on the learning process among students. Among the main research objectives were: (a) to identify students perceptions about the closure of face-to-face university courses and seminars; (b) to measure the proportion of students who were considering, at the time of the study, that the Romanian educational system is ready to switch traditional learning activities with online courses and seminars; (c) to analyze the main concerns among students toward the effects of pandemic crisis on their future educational path and educational outcomes.

The aim of the paper is to test the validity and highlight the psychometric properties of a scale  about  the  academic  worries  of  students   in  the  pandemic  context  (Pandemic Academic  Worries  among  University  Students  scale  -  PAWAUS scale), following  a quantitative   research  study  consisting  of  a  self-administered  questionnaire  within  a university   in   north-eastern    Romania   in   May   2021.  The   sample   comprised   282 undergraduate   and  master  students   in  the  Social  Work  field.  The  factor  analysis performed shows an initial validity of the PAWAUS scale. Generally, the findings of this study indicate that the students adapted rapidly and (relatively) fluidly to the new context but reported worries related to their academic and professional path. The premise from which we started  was the following: the Social Work students  follow, in the pandemic context, a speciality where the combination of theoretical knowledge with practical skills even from the undergraduate  period is essential, which may contribute to the formation of their professional identity. The second objective of the paper consisted of analysing the emotional  impact of the  pandemic  among  the  Social Work  students  using  a recently- developed  tool  –  PEIS (Ballou  et  al.,  2020). Through   the  specific  analysis  of  the relationship  between  the  two scales, we have identified that  the  worries  of the Social Work  students  are influenced  significantly  by the  emotional  impact generated  by the Covid-19 pandemic.

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, educational systems were forced to adapt to the new reality of online learning, causing practical academic specializations, such as social work (SW), to be severely affected. To highlight the perspectives of SW students during the pandemic, we used a mixed sociological approach that combined exploratory qualitative research (using the focus-group technique) with cross-sectional quantitative research. Participants who had both on-site and online SW studies before and after the COVID-19 outbreak were included in the study. The study was conducted during a period when almost all educational activities were held online. We aimed to investigate students’ perceptions of the educational process during the pandemic, how their wellbeing was affected, and their perspectives on educational and professional development. Students identified advantages of online learning, such as discovering online learning tools, and disadvantages, mainly marked by concerns about their career path once practical activities were heavily limited by institutional measures and policies. Our conclusions suggest that in a post-pandemic context, universities should provide continuous feedback, integrate students’ opinions into policies, offer material and technical support, facilitate access to high-quality resources, enrich the SW curricula with resilience programs, and organize peer-to-peer mentoring activities.

No abstract

No abstract