Comparison of full-time and distance education of Mathematics at the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra

Abstract

The dangerous coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, has been spreading around the world from the Chinese city of Wuhan for more than 15 months. More than 3.4 million people in the world have already contracted this disease, more than 12,290 in our country. As the virus spreads mainly through physical contact, to protect the health and lives of students and teachers, it was necessary to close universities and transfer teaching to the online space. The Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra has also switched to the distance form of study since March last year. In this paper, we compare the methods and forms of teaching mathematics in full-time study before and after the appearance of COVID. We compared teaching in the school year 2019/2020, when we taught in-person, and 2020/2021, when the teaching was carried out in a distance form. In both cases, we took into account the study at the Faculty of Economics and Management in the subject Mathematics IA, which is taught in the winter semester of the given school year. In this paper, we evaluated the partial score results those students achieved during the semester and their results of final exams. Both years differed in the number of partial semester works. We used the methods of mathematical descriptive statistics for this evaluation. We created databases in Excel, from which we calculated the average point evaluation of individual components and the total number of points. We also calculated the correlation coefficients between the individual parts of this course, for which students could get points. In this way we recorded the data obtained in tables and graphs. We tested hypothesis that students of full-time study would achieve better results than distance-learning students. After comparing the obtained results, we found that this hypothesis was not approved.