Teaching in Digital Surroundings – Students Opinion on Digital Tools and Digital Lectures

Abstract

In today’s world, education in higher education institutions needs to use digital technologies to reach students without them being in the same room as the teacher. The “classical lecture”, with a teacher talking and writing on a blackboard interacting with students, has been in many ways exchanged with different digital or hybrid solutions. On one hand, it allows teachers to challenge their practices and try new ways of engaging students to learn, but on the other hand, it can be challenging to master different digital solutions in a way that ensures a clear message for the students. When the whole world went into lockdown, the education at all levels needed to emergency transform learning in classrooms to learning through digital platforms. New structures had to be made, new routines, and new approaches. For some subjects it was not enough to move from sitting in a lecture room to sitting in front of a computer, it was necessary to develop solutions for presenting different programs or motivating students to be active, even if they were without a camera or microphone. Some teachers needed a blackboard to write and draw on while they talk, others needed to change between different programs to show different representations or purposes. In some cases, the digital lectures were synchronous, with teachers and students meeting at the same time to discuss a topic both in small and big groups, other times the digital lectures were asynchronous to give the students more time to prepare themselves and to activate their learning by giving them a responsibility to study individually (self-study). After few months of trying different solutions, the teachers from Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL) and Volda University College (HVO) have investigated the student’s views on the different solutions they have experienced. The students were asked to answer an anonymous questionnaire of their opinion, views, and experiences with different digital solutions. The results were categorized and analyzed to select some tools or approaches that most of the students found either better or worse for their learning.

University College Students' Perspectives and Opinions on Digital Lectures

“…This collection was gathered in November 2020 after students had a hybrid semester combining digital and non-digital lectures through different methods. The resultsfrom 57 studentsshowed some tendencies (Fojcik et al, 2021). Still, the authors decided to extend the survey to other campuses and professions to get more data.…”

“…The change that higher education in Norway went through during the pandemic became an important topic for teachers and researchers, and many of them conducted research in this new situation. A survey, conducted one year after the start of the pandemic, asking students what kind of teaching they preferred, showed that 73% of the students wanted a physical lecture in a classroom with a teacher and classmates (Figure 1 after a year) (Fojcik, Fojcik, Kyte, Pollen, & Mjånes, 2021). Furthermore, 57 students responded wholly or partly to the survey, in which they evaluated teaching methods they were experiencing during the pandemic.…”

“…However, some of the obtained results were compared with the previous survey conducted before the pandemic . In addition, some preliminary results from the first data collection were presented (Fojcik et al, 2021).…”