Investigation, evaluation and countermeasures of the current situation of online physical education in universities during COVID-19: Incorporating biomechanics research
Authors: Yu Sun , Zhang Lin , Qian Haonan 
Published: February 2025

In 2019, a sudden outbreak of novel coronavirus disease swept the world, seriously affecting education and teaching. Most universities around the world have adopted a “learning without classes” model, which is dominated by online teaching. Up to now, this teaching model under the normalization of the epidemic has been popularized all over the world. However, the evaluation of online teaching quality and the weight of influencing factors have become difficult points in measuring teaching quality, that is, the factors and weights affecting online teaching are problems that need to be studied and solved urgently. This study takes online physical education (PE) teaching in Chinese universities as the research object. While traditional research often centers on teaching evaluation methods, this research innovatively integrates biomechanics into the study. By analyzing the relevant research literature, it proposes a weight evaluation method for online PE teaching index in universities based on analytic hierarchy process (AHP)-entropy method-fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method. This method is actually a new teaching evaluation model that combines the subjective and objective weighting method with the fuzzy evaluation method. Integrating biomechanics offers a novel perspective on online PE. It aids in assessing students' exercise effectiveness and optimizing online educational resources. Advanced video analysis and motion capture can precisely measure students' joint angles, limb movement trajectories, and muscle activation patterns during exercises. This enables accurate evaluation of movement standardization. By comparing with optimal biomechanical models, teachers can provide targeted guidance, enhancing exercise effectiveness and reducing injury risks. In teaching video creation, incorporating biomechanical principles helps students understand the scientific basis of movements. For instance, in a basketball shooting tutorial, explaining the arm, wrist, and finger biomechanics can improve students' understanding and performance. Moreover, biomechanical simulation technology can create virtual sports scenes, enriching the online learning experience by allowing students to explore environmental impacts on body mechanics. We applied the method to the weight analysis of online PE teaching index in Chinese universities, and demonstrated that the method has good applicability. More importantly, we have condensed the conclusions of this research into practical countermeasures, and put forward strategies to improve the quality of online PE teaching from the macro level and the subjective research level. This research achieves innovation at the application level, improvement at the theoretical level and focus at the practical level. The research results can help Chinese universities to improve the quality of current online PE teaching, and even provide experience and reference for formulating relevant measures for international online teaching.