Teaching Mathematics Online with Increased Empathy in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Absztrakt

The emergency measures concerning enhanced epidemiological protection during the COVID-19 pandemic have put faculty members and students in a challenging situation all over the world. In this paper, we focus on the difficulties that arise in teaching and learning mathematics at a university level. The present study aims to assist instructors and policymakers in implementing online education during a crisis by pointing out some key factors that can improve the educational process and the learning experience.  We provide a summary of our strategy of teaching mathematics online during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting how the students were involved in the process of learning mathematics. We describe all the steps adopted by the instructor to improve the online mathematics learning of our students. We also present the feedback of the students regarding the online teaching of mathematics in the spring semester of the 2019/20 academic year. Our analysis is based on the answers to an anonymous survey completed by 124 full-time undergraduate students of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary. The results suggest that the students highly appreciated our efforts to create a comfortable online atmosphere by increasing empathy.