Academic Work and Life of Public Administration Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Slovenia

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed the lives of people, including higher education students. Thus, the main aim of the chapter is to present the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on academic work and life of public administration students in Slovenia compared with their counterparts from other fields of study. The analysis is based on 1,049 Slovenian respondents, covering 211 students from public administration and 838 students from other fields of study. The results show that at the time of the lockdown public administration students were the most satisfied with real-time online lectures, followed by asynchronous forms of lectures. Compared with the students from other fields of study, they were in general more satisfied with provided course assignments and feedback on performance but less satisfied with lecturers' response, openness, and information. They also found it more difficult to focus, adapt, and achieve better performance in the online environment and were in general less confident in computer skills compared to their counterparts from other fields of study.

Decoding the Digital Landscape: An Empirically Validated Model for Assessing Digitalisation across Public Administration Levels

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Public Administration Education During the Covid-19 Pandemic. Teaching Experiences and Policy Implications

“…Although multiple studies analyzed the effects that the Covid-19 pandemic had on students (see for example: Aristovnik et al, 2022;Cotoranu, Creța and Moldovan, 2021;Yaghi, 2022;Hergüner, 2021;Rinfret and Forster, 2023;Tuzcuoğlu et al, 2022) and the strategies adopted in order to deal with the effects (Raboca and Cotoranu, 2020; Hudrea, Spoaller and Urs, 2023), few authors looked at what was on the other side of the educational process -professors or university educators 1 in general. The pandemic had the same influence on teachers as it had on any other social or professional group, leading to increased levels of stress, insomnia, anxiety and uncertainty, fatigue or burnout.…”