Perceived Benefits of Online Lectures During the Pandemic: A Case Study in Engineering Education

Abstract

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

The Usefulness of Online Learning During the Covid19 Pandemic as Perceived by Engineering Education Students: A Multidimensional Model

“…This explains why they mainly appreciated the usefulness of school performance. As highlighted in a recent study (Manea et al, 2021), engineering students have many project assignments that require a presentation, which explains the relatively high score of the online platform's usefulness for presenting their work.…”

“…The evaluation instrument has been developed based on existing scales in the literature and preliminary research (Lamanauskas & Makarskaitė-Petkevičienė, 2021;Manea et al, 2021). Data has been collected from three universities -one from Lithuania and two from Romania.…”

“…Extant research shows various perceptions of distance education usefulness. Many studies are highlighting the advantages of distance learning in terms of learning flexibility, efficiency, and outcomes, self-efficacy, comfort (Almahasees et al, 2021;Cicha et al, 2021, Garcia-Alberti et al, 2021Fahrurrozi et al, 2020;Manea et al, 2021;Rizun & Strzelecki, 2020;Rets et al, 2021). Also, most studies emphasize an agreement on the fact that the educational 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.…”

Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation in online education during the pandemic as perceived by Lithuanian and Romanian university students

“…There are significant differences between groups since the motivation depends on a wide variety of conditions, such as the context of a particular country. The higher mean values in the Romanian sample could be explained in part by the perceived advantages of online lectures in engineering education that have been found in a recent study [22].…”

Exploring the Students’ Perceived Academic Value in an Exclusive Online Learning Environment

“…Perceived academic value has been scored higher than its main antecedents -the perceived learning effectiveness and the perceived enjoyment. The fact that students perceived advantage in online learning during the pandemic is explained in part by the mix of positive and negative perceptions of students (Rahiem, 2020;Lamanauskas & Makaraskaite-Petkevitciene, 2021) and by specific advantages in terms of time flexibility and money savings that have been perceived as beneficial especially by students that are working and/or are coming from other localities/ countries (Manea et al, 2021). Learning content is enriched by easier access to information and its persistence, freedom of choice in choosing learning tools increases, thus encouraging students to creativity and learning become more learner-centred.…”