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How do teachers and students feel about online teaching

Friday, 3 July 2020

The corona situation has forced an abrupt transition to online education in many institutions. Postdoc Tim Stevens is investigating and evaluating the process and outcomes of this abrupt transition at WUR. His research aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the transition to online education and map factors that shape the adoption of online tools and methods at WUR. Preliminary results show that teachers were not happy with ‘being forced’ to fully teach online. However they were able to teach the course to their own satisfaction.

Stress and satisfaction

The majority of teachers indicated that they do not like online teaching (60%). Moreover, many teachers experienced more stress (62%) and an increased workload (83%) due to the new situation. Nevertheless, on average teachers indicated to have been motivated to teach online. Moreover, they felt that they possessed the skills (both IT skills and didactical skills) needed to be able to teach online. They felt that they managed to teach the course online successfully (average of 4.1 out of 5). It is worth noting that teachers seemed to be more optimistic about the extent to which they were able to move the teaching activities to online education after a couple of weeks (based on experience) than when they started out (based on expectations). Overall the results suggest that although teachers were not happy with ‘being forced’ to teach fully online, they were able to teach the course to their own satisfaction.

Student learning

Whereas teachers were satisfied about their own teaching skills and performance, the general opinion of teachers was that the learning of students is somewhat worse in online education compared to face-to-face education (the collaborative learning among students, the motivation of students, the engagement of students and the feedback of teachers were all considered to be somewhat worse in online education).
However, students’ course satisfaction of the online education in the same period of this year was similar to that of the previous year (on average 3.8 this year, compared to 3.7 last year). The level of learning (acquiring new knowledge/skills), the level of engagement, the workload, and the assessment by students were all rated positively, with an average of 3.7 out of 5.

Blended learning in future education

We asked teachers how they changed their teaching method and whether they would like to keep or discard these changes. Although some teachers stressed that they would like to ‘go back to normal’ and discard all changes, the majority of teachers indicated to keep at least some of the changes. These results provide valuable information to prepare for and shape the education of the future, which is likely to involve more blended learning.

Read the full ‘first results’ report here.