The Importance of Synchronous Online Learning for Student Success in Exams

Zagreb University of Applied Sciences adapted immediately to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis and lockdown in mid-March 2020, by organizing online education via a video conferencing platform. Online courses for undergraduate and graduate studies of electrical engineering have been held synchronously with a recording possibility, followed by related audio / video / written materials for students' individual asynchronous online learning and knowledge assessment via LMS. In this paper, the results of an internal project about the correlation of students' success in exams and their attendance at synchronous online lectures and exercises held at Department of Electrical Engineering are presented. The modeling of data was performed by linear regression and results were compared with similar ones based on previous face-to-face teaching results. The analysis showed a strong positive correlation between students' success in exams and the existence of rich self-learning content as well as their attendance at synchronous online lectures and exercises.