Is Romania Prepared for eLearning during the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Abstract

Today, Romanian universities largely have eLearning platforms generally based on the most popular Moodle-LMS platform or on the most popular collaborative educational platforms designed by Microsoft and Google, which contain mail group modules, virtual classes, video conferencing, presentation and testing. In the context of the pandemic generated by COVID-19, the authors tried to investigate the way in which Romanian society has managed to face this challenge in the field of education. The events followed one another very quickly, and the first thing that crashed was the medical system, quickly followed by the economic environment and then, obviously, education. The authors’ research methodology was based on the interpretation of the results of a questionnaire composed of 19 questions and applied to a population of 200 respondents. The survey period was only 24 h, between 29 April 2020 at 1 p.m. and 30 April 2020 at 1 p.m. The investigated population, the respondents, were students of the University of Petroșani undertaking bachelor and master studies for the academic year 2019–2020, but the study could be extrapolated to the Romanian education system.