Barletta, Vita Santa and Cassano, Fabio and Marengo, Agostino and Pagano, Alessandro and Pange, Jenny and Piccinno, Antonio
The COVID-19 pandemic marked an important breakthrough in human progress: from working habits to social life, the world population's behaviours changed according to the new lifestyle requirements. In this changing environment, university courses and learning methods evolved along with other "remote" working activities. For this quasi-experimental study, we discuss the effectiveness of the changes made by the LUMSA University in Rome, comparing two different groups of students who attended a master's course with blended and fully remote methodologies. Here, we focused our attention on the paradigm shift, comparing the data gathered during the blended course in the 2019/2020 academic year with data gathered during the same course, but conducted fully online, in the academic year 2020/2021. Considering the sample size and type, the group comparison was made using a non-parametric test (U-test). The statistical analysis results suggest that there was no substantial difference between the students' performance, confirming that the course changes made to adapt to the pandemic situation were successful and that learning effectiveness was preserved.
This is the repository containing data and images used in the article.
In the images folder are saved the images obtained from the python notebook and an export of those from the exploratory analysis run on LibreOffice Calc (compatible with MS Excel).
The student analysis.ipynb contains the python notebook with all the elaboration performed.
The file Exploratory_Analysis.xlsx contains the raw data and the plots of the average and the standard deviation.
The file students_data.xlsx is an export of the cleaned data from the "Exploratory Analysis" and is the file used to read the data for the elaboration.
@Article{app12178438, AUTHOR = {Barletta, Vita Santa and Cassano, Fabio and Marengo, Agostino and Pagano, Alessandro and Pange, Jenny and Piccinno, Antonio}, TITLE = {Switching Learning Methods during the Pandemic: A Quasi-Experimental Study on a Master Course}, JOURNAL = {Applied Sciences}, VOLUME = {12}, YEAR = {2022}, NUMBER = {17}, ARTICLE-NUMBER = {8438}, URL = {https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/12/17/8438}, ISSN = {2076-3417}, ABSTRACT = {The COVID-19 pandemic marked an important breakthrough in human progress: from working habits to social life, the world population’s behaviours changed according to the new lifestyle requirements. In this changing environment, university courses and learning methods evolved along with other “remote” working activities. For this quasi-experimental study, we discuss the effectiveness of the changes made by the LUMSA University in Rome, comparing two different groups of students who attended a master’s course with blended and fully remote methodologies. Here, we focused our attention on the paradigm shift, comparing the data gathered during the blended course in the 2019/2020 academic year with data gathered during the same course, but conducted fully online, in the academic year 2020/2021. Considering the sample size and type, the group comparison was made using a non-parametric test (U-test). The statistical analysis results suggest that there was no substantial difference between the students’ performance, confirming that the course changes made to adapt to the pandemic situation were successful and that learning effectiveness was preserved.}, DOI = {10.3390/app12178438} }