Investigating the Attitudes of First-Year Students of the Faculty of Physical Education and Sports of Galati towards Online Teaching Activities during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The paper identifies the perceptions of first-year undergraduate students from the Faculty of Physical Education and Sports in Galati on online teaching activities, dominant and needful in the current pandemic context. The questionnaire used contains 23 items and was structured based on four distinctive factors, namely attractiveness, accessibility, motivation and efficiency; it was applied after the winter session of the academic year 2020–2021. The values of the internal consistency coefficient Cronbach’s alpha indicate for the four mentioned factors a high fidelity for the measurements of the investigated features. The results of the 147 completed questionnaires allowed the definition of the independent variables sex (boys and girls) and environment of origin (rural and urban) the identification of their influence on the scores of each item (dependent variables) by using the statistical technique MANOVA (multivariate and univariate analysis), besides the values of F and the corresponding significance thresholds; the magnitude of the effect, expressed by partial eta squared (η2p), was also calculated. Even if the averages of item scores differ between sexes and backgrounds, the differences noted are in few cases significant: attractiveness and socialization for those in urban areas; participation in activities and effective involvement for girls; technical deficiencies, platform logging and weak computer skills for those in rural areas; and an increase in free time for girls and students in urban areas. The study undertaken allows the identification of the favorable aspects and the shortcomings of online teaching activities, these being the premises for optimizing the teaching process in the following stages.

Keywords

• pandemic
• students
• e-learning
• opinions
• physical education