Analysis of Student Performance in Face-To-Face Versus Stimulated Online Learning

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an immense impact on almost all aspects of everyday life, changing how the world functions. Many sectors including health and economy, as well as social life and the education system, regarded by many as main pillars of every society, had to adjust to these new and unforeseen circumstances. The education system in particular is well-known for its inability to adapt to innovation, reforms or changes quickly. The pandemic, however, brought upon us new challenges and forced educators to search for alternative solutions to problems that arose. On the Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade, this challenge was met with a swift response. Classes were organized online, using the capabilities of the Microsoft Teams platform. On one hand, the software allowed students to maintain adequate social interaction with educators, while on the other, the educators themselves had access to all necessary equipment needed to provide students with the best possible teaching experience given the circumstances. Online teaching has taken place during the period ranging from March 2020 until February 2022. Two years later, it is possible to evaluate the effects of the above-mentioned changes on the educational system. The main aim of this paper is to compare the results of different parts of an operations' management course during stimulated online learning versus the results achieved during traditional face-to-face course organization. Online courses were stimulated by weekly extracurricular assignments that were reviewed by the designated educator. The course in question is a final (fourth) year course, implying that both groups of students had at least two years of courses organized traditionally, face-to-face. The analysis covers the previous four school years (from 18/19 to 21/22), the former two being face-to-face, while the latter two being organized online. The analysis includes methods of descriptive and inferential statistics. Final grades of all students, as well as number of points achieved on different parts of the course were taken into consideration. Main contributions of this research give insight into whether the pandemic has caused us to accept new technological advancements and integrate them into the educational system faster, thus increasing student and teacher performance, or is traditional face-to-face teaching in fact something that we should not stray away from and cannot be adequately replaced.