Teaching Course on Algorithms and Data Structures during the Coronavirus Pandemic

At the beginning of spring 2020, the life in Slovakia and in other European countries has slowed down due to coronavirus disease 2019 caused by SARS-CoV-2. Slovakia and many other countries have tried to stop or slow down the spread of the coronavirus by minimizing face-to-face interactions between people. This has resulted in reduction of public transport, closing churches, shops, restaurants, and a lot of other services, including education. During the second half of March 2020, most education institutions, including universities, were closed to the public. Students and teachers could not visit them, and the process of education had to move from a classical physical space to a virtual space. Traditional face-to-face education supported by online learning had to be replaced by distance learning very quickly. However, most of the education institutions in Slovakia were not be prepared for this since distance learning had not been actively used by them before. Also universities, which provide education that requires much more self-study than in case of primary and secondary schools, challenged to problems how the distance learning should be realized in such a short term. In this paper, we present how some of the challenges and issues related to fast transformation of face-to-face education to education based on distance learning were solved by us within a course on algorithms and data structures taught at the Faculty of Management Science and Informatics of University of Zilina. Results presented in the paper indicate that a course requiring active participation of a student in the learning process by solving real world problems can be taught effectively using distance learning and the quality of education and knowledge grasped by students do not suffer from absence of face-to-face lectures and practical classes.