Online university education during the COVID-19 pandemic. How efficient are the adapted instruction models?

ABSTRACT

In the context of the coronavirus pandemic and of transferring face-to-face academic activities to online, we analyse several e-learning solutions in Geography university education, from the perspective of three components e-communication, e-training, and e-assessment. The aim of this research is to investigate the use of photographs to enable learning of Geography during the educational process organized synchronously and asynchronously at Babes-Bolyai University, in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. After analyzing the online activities realized in the virtual classes on the Microsoft Teams platform, we identified, discussed, and represented schematically three instruction models, with their advantages and disadvantages, considering the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning. The efficiency of these models depends on the features of the discipline and on professor's competence level in specialty and in didactic transposition.