Educational Alternatives, Volume 19, 2021

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on all aspects of life, including teaching courses at college level. Mandatory social distancing and imposed limits on the number of people in enclosed spaces forced many colleges to transform the courses they teach into online courses. Distance learning became the norm for the students and teachers as well. Global health crisis, online teaching, distance learning, isolation and limited teacher-student interaction may lead to the decline in student motivation and their achievements. In the online environment, the teachers are faced with a challenge of how to motivate the students, how to actively include them in the teaching process and decrease their feeling of isolation as well as finding various ways to keep the teacher-student interaction at a high level. In this paper I will explore the effects the COVID-19 pandemic had on teaching the undergraduate course of Operating Systems at the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Belgrade. I will also present the teaching methodology and all the equipment and software tools used in teaching the course online. Furthermore, student results on the final exam during the pandemic will be compared to those in the previous years. Finally, I will analyze the benefits and drawbacks of the presented approach in teaching, as well as a few possible solutions to the problems that arise in online teaching.