Measuring Students’ Perception of COVID-19 Impact on Higher Education Through the National Student Survey in Romania

Abstract

AbstractThe article presents the first National Student Survey (NSS-RO) results. The questionnaire was opened to all Romanian students between November 2020 and January 2021 and involved 23,796 respondents from 76 higher education institutions. Initially designed to be a tool to improve the quality of higher education, given the epidemiological context created with the Covid-19 pandemic, it expanded with one section to measure students’ perception of its impact on higher education. This work intends to establish a correlation between student dropout intention during the Covid-19 pandemic and the direct support received from higher education institutions regarding material resources, such as tablets, laptops, or other similar tools. Secondly, it analyses the students’ perception of the transition into emergency remote education. We measured in this sense their opinion on how easily they accessed mainly online educational resources, the information received, and the teachers’ performance during classes. These results provide one of the first steps towards understanding the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the Romanian higher education system. The massive interference provoked a giant leap in digitalisation and significantly changed how universities apply Student-Centred Learning (SCL) practices. Also, this study contributes to the area of national student surveys.