The Perception of Slovak Students on Distance Online Learning in the Time of Coronavirus—A Preliminary Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The title should have information about the students who are answer the questionaire. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your advice. The title has been modified. Please see the manuscript. In addition, the information about the students is also given in the lines 96-104.

Best regards,

Authors

Reviewer 2 Report

The article present students ́perception of distance online learning in the time of Coronavirus.

I see many areas in need of improving the manuscript:

1. In the Method Section, Authors should clearly indicate the central research question. What was the main purpose or goal of the study?  What was the theoretical model that served to guide Authors research questions? 
2. The modelling was very basic. Is the data you have is more susceptible to multivariate analysis?
3. To how many respondents the questionnaire was sent, how many were returned, and how many rejected and why?
4. Authors describe sample but fail to describe sampling procedures.
5. Who created the questionnaire? If the authors of this article, then they should explain how they created it, how they selected the items, did they conduct the pilot studies and also what results did they obtain? Evidence of validity and reliability is not provided.
6. I have doubts about the ethical aspects of this research as the authors do not mention it. Was the survey obligatory or optional, were students informed that they may stop completing the questionnaire at any time, whether they were presented with the purpose of the study, etc ...
7. One of my biggest concerns about the paper is its very modest contribution. It could be argued that the study makes only a small incremental contribution to education literature. So positioning the study as a research note might be beneficial. This article makes only a few connections to past work. Lacks synthesis and evaluation.
8. Authors should provide more information about the limitation of this study.

Conclusion: I think this manuscript should be reworked because of its interest in the journal's readers.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your pertinent comments, as well as for your suggestions. We have tried hard to respond to all of them. Thanks to them, our manuscript has been significntly improved.

Please see the attachment about our responses, as well as the revised manuscript. All the changes have been highlighted in yellow.

Best regards,

Authors

Reviewer 3 Report

The topics addressed in the study are now very important. Not only teachers at different levels of formal and non-formal education but also students are struggling with e-learning. The main idea of the reviewed study was to show the perspective of e-learning in the COVID era in terms of technological conditions, skills, learning environment and teaching methods. The study was conducted in Slovakia in one of the local schools. Despite the important premise of the text, the study has a number of shortcomings in terms of research methodology, theoretical assumptions and presentation of research results. All comments are presented below:

1. The title should be relevant to the content. Research is not of a generic nature.
2. Important information such as details of the test sample is missing in the summary.
3. The text does not define the main variables in the introduction, so what will actually be measured is not known. All variables included in the research tool should have clear definitions in the introductory part.
4. The theoretical introduction does not show the characteristics associated with e-learning in Slovakia or neighbouring countries, i.e. the Visegrad group. The reader should know the background, i.e. the context of the conditions accompanying this study.
5. The text is not prepared according to the IMRAD standard. There is a lack of a clearly defined research methodology, i.e. separate points in which the research objectives, the subject of the research, the properties of the tool with psychometric indicators, research results presented in the order determined by the research problems are discussed.
6. The selection of the sample is not justified. Why was the research carried out in only one school in Slovakia? 72 respondents are too small a research sample. This distorts the conclusions strongly.
7. There is a lack of a solid discussion of the research tool. It is not known what scales were used to measure, what is the internal consistency, how the individual factors load (factor analysis is advisable)
8. Part of the presentation of research results is based on incomplete descriptive statistics. This is far too little. It is postulated to add correlation and regression.
9. The results section is mixed with the discussion section. This is a big technical error.
10. A linguistic correction is also postulated.

The text has a lot of methodological and substantive limitations. Unfortunately, I do not recommend the study for further stages of the review.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your pertinent comments, as well as for your suggestions. We have tried hard to respond to all of them. Thanks to them, our manuscript has been significntly improved.

Please see the attachment about our responses, as well as the revised manuscript. All the changes have been highlighted in yellow.

Best regards,

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I accept all changes that have been made by the authors following my comments and suggestions. 

Author Response

Thank you. Authors.

Reviewer 3 Report

I stand by the opinion of the first review. The vast majority of comments from the first review have not been taken into account. The text is characterised by a very poor methodology. Moreover, the presentation of results is based on also insufficient descriptive statistics. The research tool does not have an adequate theoretical framework. I have a completely different opinion from the other two reviewers. The text is of very low quality. Unfortunately, I do not recommend the study for publication.

Author Response

The title should have information about the students who are answer the questionnaire. Dear Reviewer, thank you very much for your advice. The tile has been modified. Please see the manuscript. In addition, the information about students is given in the lines 96-104.