Analysis of education quality at a technical university during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The article considers the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic – specifically the introduced quarantine measures – on the educational process at the Dnipro National University of Railway Transport (named after аcademician, V. Lazaryan). In general, distance learning has caused inconvenience to all participants in the learning process, teachers and students alike. First of all, the general problems that teachers faced across the board, as the main guarantors of the success of the educational process, are noted. Then, based on the concrete example of a technical university in Ukraine, an analysis of the success of student learning during a pandemic has been carried out. To achieve this, the static data on the success of students’ training across different courses and specialties for the last four academic years are considered. It was found that, for both students and professors, the pandemic caused significant inconvenience – plus, in some cases, mental health and technical problems were not fully resolved, which led to a further decrease in the quality of the educational process. In light of these findings, in order to improve the quality of education, proposals are made to: use tutoring with first to fourth year students; improve the quality of technical equipment and the internet connection, and to pay more attention to high-quality digital content for teaching in distance learning, as well as conducting training courses on working with such content.