Perceived Effectiveness of Gender-Based Virtual Education in Times of COVID-19 Pandemic in University Higher Education

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic caused many processes to be digitized, one of them being education. With regard to university education, it was carried out virtually, in such a way that students were affected by the confinement and the coupling to a new educational reality. The objective was to analyze the perception of the effectiveness of the students based on their gender in the teaching - virtual learning process, under a quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional, and descriptive approach. A survey structured in five dimensions psychological, technological, pedagogical, academic activities, and communication, was applied to a sample of 1,348 students from a public university. The results show that there is a significant difference between the perception of effectiveness by gender, taking into account the career groups. In technology, women perceive high effectiveness compared to men, in pedagogical terms, men have a better perception than women, academic activities and communication are perceived in a similar way in both genders, finally, psychologically, women were more affected than men. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.