DOES ONLINE DIDACTICS AFFECT THE PERCEIVED QUALITY OF MACHINE DRAWING COURSES?

Considering reviewers' opinions on the paper, presented at EPDE2021, in which the data were not sufficient to compare different cohorts, now we are able to answer if there have been differences in students' assessments, based on some questions of the academic survey on didactics, comparing answers for courses held pre-and-during Covid19 pandemic. In 2020 every educational institution moved their didactics toward an online platform. Every course had to introduce and experiment with new forms of didactics that prevent in-person events, either in lectures or laboratory. Courses of design traditionally require a strict relation between student-instructor and student-student. The need to operate by moving the contact to an online connection creates, at the beginning of the period, a lot of distrust among teachers of such courses. The “Machine Drawing” course is one of these. Briefly recalling how the courses have been revised, with the employment of a communication platform like Teams®, the answers, given by students, are collected and the differences along the time are highlighted. Three academic years have been considered: 2017-2018, 2019-2020, and 2020-2021. A further correlation has been made considering different didactics and the global efficiency of the course in terms of abandonment, number of successes (number of people that pass the exam), and the effects on the grades (marks) obtained. Reflecting on such data, a new consideration has been done on the methodologies that can still continue to be used in the future when the explicit problem of pandemic emergency does will not influence anymore the traditional way of teaching.