Towards Digitalisation - Student Experiences in Online Education at a Higher Education Institution

Abstract

The emergency situation caused by the coronavirus epidemic has transformed all arenas of the education system. The introduction of online education has necessitated a thorough rethinking of how students and faculty are prepared for the transition, as well as consideration of whether the teaching method is effective beyond the lecture hall / lab framework and translated into technological tools.In our research, we examined Hungarian and foreign students of our higher education institution along this topic. One of the questions in our study was whether we see differences in the learning habits of our diverse students and whether the traditional or online form of education better meets the needs of our student community. Most of all our main research task was to explore the experiences of our institution’s first entirely online/digital semester. The study is based on an online questionnaire survey and the analysis of the data through the university database. Our results indicate that higher education still has a role to play in exploring the experiences of online education, solving its problems, and our results identify additional tasks and directions for development.