The impact of COVID-19 on university education in Portugal: insights from students and teachers

Resumo

The COVID-19 pandemic become a critical challenge for the higher education sector worldwide and in Portugal. Under such a circumstance, the exploration of the capacity of this sector to react and adapt to such a state of uncertainty has become more of huge importance. In this investigation, we critically reflect on the Portuguese teaching experience during the early COVID-19 lockdown in this country. This is an exploratory study based on a qualitative approach with an aim to reflect about new practices of teaching under a pandemic emergency. Based on such experience in Portugal regarding online teaching, we explored perspectives from two different groups (a) 188 teachers and (b) 1.859 students who experienced such online environment teaching, the challenges arising from online teaching, and, in fact, if online methods influenced or not the results obtained by students. Results show a consistency between the two previous samples, clearly demonstrating that the online experience implemented during the pandemic was satisfactory both to teachers and students. The main pit fall on online environment was the lack of socialization and evaluation system while the main strength of such teaching method was the saved time on travelling. Finally, there was no evidence that online evaluation had a significative influence on the final results by students.