Thrown into Deep Water: Feedback on Student Satisfaction—A Case Study in Hungarian and Romanian Universities

Abstract

As a result of the COVID-19 health epidemic, online life has exploded into our daily lives, forcing most of us to move previously seemingly irreplaceable “face-to-face” activities into “non-face-to-face” meetings and activities in many sectors. One of the biggest challenges has been in the field of education: This sector, compared to other sectors, was less digitized. Under these circumstances, the entire education process was transferred to online space overnight, which was/is a major challenge for everyone. Thus, a questionnaire survey was conducted among students from two universities in Hungary and Romania, the results of which are included in the present article. The aim of the research was to measure students’ satisfaction and to examine the benefits of online education, for example, in terms of introducing hybrid education over the long term. Descriptive statistics as well as the Wilcoxon rank-sum test were used to analyze the database. The results showed that, from a practical point of view, there was no significant difference between the Hungarian and Romanian respondents who had a fundamentally positive view of digital education. In this respect, positive feedback can be seen as encouraging, especially for those individuals and social strata who may find online education much more attractive than traditional physical teaching. Online education could be an attractive, accessible, sustainable form of further education in the long run.

Keywords

• customer/students experience
• sustainability online education
• higher education
• Hungary
• Romania