Post-Covid, UK HE has dramatically increased its online educational provision. In part this has been the result of a rapid acceleration in the uptake of learning technologies, initially due to the requirements of social distancing. While a majority of HE students and educators may have been keen to return to face to face teaching, in a post-pandemic world, learning at a distance, be it in the form of wholly online and asynchronous courses of study, or as a blended component, is clearly here to stay. The reasons for this are varied; it is often suggested that online learning provides students with greater flexibility and accessibility, lecturers (understandably) may be keen to re-use and refine materials and approaches developed in line with the online pivot, and, perhaps more cynically, distance learning and blended ‘offers’ may appear as alluring income streams for universities looking to expand in an increasingly competitive market.
At York, while the institutional position is that the default mode of teaching is, on campus, face to face, increasing numbers of our students are engaging with online, blended and distance learning. Yet if, in line with the UK HE sector as a whole, we have adopted online learning to a previously unprecedented extent, how is this working out in pedagogical terms? One key issue, something of a recurring theme in SoTL journal club discussions, is engagement; how can we design online learning resources to ensure that they promote deep and active learning?
In the paper to be discussed at our forthcoming meeting, authors David Baum and Stephen Brown suggest that despite the widespread uptake in distance and online learning, our understanding of the amount of time students spend learning in online contexts and how they engage with different course components remains limited. By extension, they suggest that this in turn, limits the evidence base from which we design online courses. Drawing on 645 responses to a survey circulated among distance learning students at the University of London, Baum and Brown aim to address this gap by evaluating students’ attitudes toward various components of online learning, including ‘content’ such as readings or data, individual activities and shared activities. A core finding of the paper is that while educators may place high value on interactive and collaborative learning tasks as a means of facilitating deep or transformative learning, students do not share this perspective.
Questions to consider
- With reference to the paper and your own experiences, how would you define distance, online and blended learning? To what extent are these modes of delivery part of your academic practice and teaching context and what challenges do they pose re. learning design?
- The authors note that ‘At the university of London, neither the amount of time distance learning students spend engaged in learning, nor how they engage with different course elements is well-understood.’ (p. 438). How does this compare with your own practice? What measures/proxies do you currently employ to evaluate learners’ engagement with online content and how does this data inform (yours/colleagues’ practice re.) learning design?
- Of the six recommendations made in relation to enhancing student perceptions of active/collaborative learning, which do you think would be most effective and why?
- What do you perceive to be the limitations of the study? What questions does it raise for future scholarship?
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Network 