The Attitude Towards Online Education as a Result of the Covid- 19 Outbreak: An International Comparison Among Students and Lecturers

This study explores the attitude difference in online teaching among students and lecturers from various countries (Israel, USA, Slovenia, Thailand, Poland and Czech Republic) as the results of the Covid-19 outbreak. The impact on health systems as well as on economy due to the Covid-19 outbreak, had also infected education systems. Teachers and children from Elementary schools to Higher education had suffered from the global changes in education all over the world. In most of the economy advanced countries, students had to acquire knowledge thorough virtual environment with different types of applications such as: 'zoom', 'Google Meet' ]https://meet.google.com[, MS Teams and many more. In addition, lecturers had to tune their presentations, as well as material for practice and additional academic content to online environment, which in many fields and courses especially those related to social sciences and business administration was challenging and demanding. Yet, it turned out that during the outbreak and quarantine, students and lecturers had to adapt themselves to the global change by using their online learning tools. From an initial survey conducted in Israel during 3-4/2020, it turned out that the more than 40% of the students had reported on an ineffective online outcomes and their satisfaction ranged from not satisfied at all to barely satisfied. Similar to them, lecturers had also reported on their difficulties related to online teaching so as on their dissatisfaction from teaching online instead of face to face meetings. In the literature, so far only few studies had dealt with the differences in online teaching attitudes among students and lecturers. Therefore, the current study with its results and implications will shed light on these attitude differences in online teaching by data analysis from various countries which it's results may be used to point out the direction of future higher education lecturing in social sciences and business administration.