Effect of Distance Teaching on Student’s Course Evaluations

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused major changes in the learning and teaching process. One of the most common changes was migration to online lectures. This has changed how teaching practices are employed and demanded a rapid yet effective shift in traditional teaching methods. The unforeseen quick transition also presented a big challenge for students and teachers. Both needed to adapt to new tools, technologies, but also methods and partially a new mindset. The situation has a significant impact on the education process, particularly on students. At the University of Maribor, students fill out a survey each year to evaluate educators and their workload for all the courses they participated in that year. In this paper, we use this survey to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the study process. We investigated two aspects: the students' perceived effort required to finish their courses and their evaluation of educators. We used the student survey results from the study year 2017/2018 until the most recent one, for which data is available in 2020/2021. The results show no impact on the education process as the students' perceived effort and the educators' scores show a trend of improvement over the years. From the data analysis, we can conclude that in the year when COVID-19 started (2019/2020), the shift to distance learning slightly impacted the perception of students' effort, but later this trend returned to the pre-COVID-19 situation.