COVID-19 EFFECT: FROM FACE-TO-FACE TEACHING TO FORCED DUAL TEACHING. TOLERANCE OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS TO THE CHANGE IN THE SYSTEM

Abstract

The health crisis caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) has led to multiple changes in all aspects of our lives. Higher education has been no exception, as the global spread of the coronavirus and the consequent confinements or other measures to allow the distance required to curb its spread have led to the closure of universities and a shift to alternative systems to face-to-face teaching within days (Dhawan, 2020). Indeed, online teaching has been the predominant choice in the first stage of the crisis. Expectations of improvement have facilitated the design of strategies based on a dual system from the beginning of the academic year 2020-2021, but the not very favourable evolution in many European countries, and especially in Spain, has led to the combination of the dual system with the online system. Nevertheless, it was still a matter of synchronous sessions that allow the option of instant feedback between students and teachers to be maintained (Singh and Thurman, 2019), as well as a certain level of social interaction (McBrien et al., 2009). This whole process involves new experiences and practices for both teachers and students.Although there is a relative abundance of work addressing the determinants of academic performance of primary and secondary school students, considering very different aspects, the current context urges a specific analysis of the dual/online teaching system and its effect on academic performance. Our aim, therefore, is to explore distance learning and its relationship with the academic performance of university students in a dual/online teaching system, including in the analysis multiple control variables (student characteristics, motivation, learning styles, etc.) to check its effect, differentiating by gender, and, where appropriate, to measure its relative importance. The results are based on a survey addressed to students of the subject World Economics in the degrees of ADE, Marketing, I2ADE and TADE of the University of Alicante. After using appropriate econometric techniques, it is determined that female students, in addition to having higher participation in the survey, tend to indicate that the dual system is less efficient than the traditional (face-to-face) teaching system, while male students tend to opt for a similar level of efficiency. This may be due to the much higher participation of female students in both theory and practical classes, although predominantly in a virtual form. Students, on the other hand, show a very low participation in both face-to-face and virtual classes regardless of the type of class (theory or practical). The next step in this analysis is to test the relationship between non-face-to-face attendance and academic performance under the dual/online teaching system. This could allow, on the one hand, to design specific treatments in the learning process for certain groups of students and in different types of teaching (face-to-face, online or dual) and, on the other hand, give rise to collaborations between educational institutions at different levels in order to mitigate the possible effects that could be observed, if any.