The educational process changed significantly in the context of the pandemic generated by the Coronavirus. University students had to move from the traditional classes and laboratories to the online platform. As extant research shows, this shift to online education has both advantages and drawbacks. The objective of this research is to analyze the advantages of online lectures as perceived by engineering students from a Romanian technical university in Bucharest. The analysis has been done on a sample of 109 university students. The results revealed two kinds of benefits: educational and personal. The most important educational benefits were the online participation and the possibility to record and review courses or seminars any time and from anywhere. The most important personal benefits were time-saving, comfort, and money-saving. Overall, the perceptions of engineering students are suggesting a relative acceptance of the online lecture format which contrasts with the results of similar studies in the literature

With the unprecedented crisis created by the Coronavirus pandemic, online teaching and learning became a global solution - embraced by the whole world - that tried to cover, at least in part, in part the problems encountered by the educational systems. An exclusively online format of teaching and learning proved to be a challenge for both the didactic and the learning process. Although the extant research during the pandemic is very abundant, there are few approaches addressing the different perceptions reported by university students enrolled in various programs. This research aims to explore the usefulness of online learning as perceived by civil engineering students, from a multidimensional perspective. A multidimensional model has been developed that manifests on four dimensions: social usefulness of online lectures, the usefulness of online learning platform, learning effectiveness, and, usefulness for school performance. The results show a relatively low perception of the online learning usefulness in an exclusively online educational context, which disables active learning through hands-on experience in laboratory and real-life building sites (considering the regular study process). The model has been cross-validated on a sample of students enrolled in various educational programs then the differences between samples have been analyzed and discussed. Keywords: Covid-19 pandemic, engineering students, learning platform, online education, perceived usefulness

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The pandemic generated by the Coronavirus COVID-19 challenged universities to go exclusively online thus affecting both the education and personal life of teachers and students. This work analyzes the perceptions of Lithuanian and Romanian university students as regards the extrinsic and intrinsic motivation of online learning during the pandemic. Following the technology acceptance theory, extrinsic motivation has been operationalized as the perceived usefulness and intrinsic motivation as the perceived enjoyment. Although the results show a low to moderate motivation for online/distance learning, interesting differences between the two motivating factors have been found, as well as between the perceptions of students from the two countries.

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