Five years after CovidBlended learning
Interaction is a priority
Door Rob van der Wal
By Rob van der Wal
Rob van der Wal
With the Covid pandemic far behind us, life has gone back to normal. But has the virus had any lasting effects on the university, and if so, what kind of effects? What, if anything, has improved, and what things will never return to the way they were? In this series of articles, UKrant looks into how the pandemic affected education, student association life, and our social behaviour.
‘I used to make a joke in Covid time that everyone should be dressed during online lectures and none should be in bed’, says Carole Fuller, a lecturer in English for academic purposes. But even that turned out to be too much to ask. ‘We saw male students with their tops half open and some of the students had no room to follow the lecture anywhere else than from their beds.’
Another drawback was the total lack of interaction. ‘There was no room for small talk at all’, says Merel Keijzer, professor of English linguistics. ‘Not everyone understood how to behave online. No one ever answered my question of how they were, and I couldn’t read their expressions clearly.’
Keijzer and Fuller definitely don’t miss the online classes the pandemic necessitated. Students themselves weren’t happy either: according to a December 2020 poll by the Intercity Student Consultation, only 30 percent of students were in favour of continued online education.
Added value
‘It was an emergency response’, acknowledges Tracy Poelzer, educational specialist at the UG’s Educational Support and Innovation (ESI). ‘At the start of the pandemic we were told: you have to do online classes, and you have to do it next Monday. Everyone did the best they could with what we knew, but we had no examples of good course design.’
We kept the advantages of online education and did away with the rest
But even then, Poelzer realised that online education also has its advantages. One of them is the flipped classroom, which involves students watching a pre-recorded video on the material, leaving time in class for questions and assignments. Polls and quizzes help lecturers check whether students understand the material.
She quickly tried to turn her classes into a form of blended learning, combining online and at-home learning with interaction with the students. ‘Online training was my speciality. So I had the skills to support lecturers in making video calls more interactive, how to make polls, chat with students and make breakout groups.’
Rapid developments
Now, five years later, all these experiments have led to a good mix, says Keijzer. ‘We kept the advantages for online classes and PhD ceremonies and did away with the rest.’ While there were still more than two thousand UG sessions in virtual classroom Kaltura in the past six months, very few classes these days are hybrid. ‘Lecturers would have to interact with students in real life and keep an eye on the online session, and that’s asking a lot of them.’
‘People who think blended learning is something that belonged to the pandemic, really throw out the baby with the bath water’, Poelzer adds. ‘People were afraid to use technology before the pandemic, but now they see it’s actually very easy.’
In fact, without the pandemic and much-hated online classes, blended learning wouldn’t be where it is today, thinks Sofie van den Eynde, head of professional development at the Centre for Learning at Teaching at the Faculty of Science and Engineering. ‘It all developed really quickly.’
A few examples: ‘For instance, lecturers are using Discord during their classes for discussion, safety instructions for labs have been turned into videos and multiple-choice tests, and we’ve even made 360-degree videos of our laboratories to allow students to better prepare their experiments.’
Budget cuts
However, Poelzer is worried that the current budget cuts will be disadvantageous to blended learning. ‘In times of budget cuts, it’s tempting to take away some tools used for blended learning, such as the online learning platform FeedbackFruits.’
It’s tempting to take away some tools used for blended learning
The licence for this application expires at the end of the year, and the decision to extend it is the faculties’ responsibility, says junior coordinator for educational applications Inge Pot. ‘FeedbackFruits is relatively expensive, but lecturers do like the tool. I can’t really say anything about what they’ll decide.’
To convince lecturers to utilise blended learning more, Poelzer and her colleagues want to emphasise what it can do. While it’s not a holy grail, it can help students work on the material themselves. This is known as active learning. ‘But not all lecturers have cottoned on to that yet’, says Van den Eynde.
Online game
One person who’s fully focused on active learning is Daniël Vullings, assistant professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB). His game OptiEcon has students run their own beer brewery in class using a large online data sheet. They have to keep track of everything: the purchasing price of raw materials, as well as their diversity policies, maintenance of the factory floor, and the amount of greenhouse gases the factory produces.
‘Normally, students only learn about small parts of the whole’, he says. ‘That means they lack an overview of the larger issues.’ In the beer brewery, all those elements are incorporated in the game. Vullings can switch parts of the game on or off, making it easier or more complex for his students. ‘That teaches them how to structure the larger challenges they take on.’
AI is pushing us towards different learning processes
Tech and AI will definitely start playing a larger role in how we shape education, Poelzer expects, just like they do in the game. ‘The people who say we can go back to lectures in the way they were, are wrong’, she says. ‘AI is pushing us towards different learning processes as well, because people can now write entire essays with large language models. So we should focus more on the process of learning something instead. Blended learning can help create opportunities for that.’
AI will also change how exams are administered. Because information is at our fingertips and chatbots can formulate answers, purely testing for knowledge has become useless. These days, exams focus increasingly on students being able to apply the knowledge with open-book exams, for instance.
Pot says the department of educational support has noticed the change. ‘Even though exams are administered in person again, we’ve seen that a lot of changes made during the pandemic, like open-book exams or other types of exams allowing students to bring resources, have stayed around.’
Hurdles
Unfortunately, not all lecturers incorporate blended learning to the extent that Poelzer had hoped. ‘Redesigning courses to have a good blended design takes time, which lecturers don’t often have. It’s not always easy to see how the benefits outweigh that cost.’
Just because every course has its own Brightspace page, Pot adds, that doesn’t mean it’s considered blended learning. For that, courses have to incorporate online and collaborative tools that ensure interaction within the course. That means just putting videos online isn’t sufficient, either.
Another hurdle is the students themselves, says Van den Eynde: in the flipped classroom, they themselves are responsible for preparing the material. ‘You then run the risk of students not doing that properly. That’s definitely a weakness of the system.’
She therefore doesn’t think all education needs to be blended, and certainly not all in the same way. ‘If everyone started using the flipped classroom method, students would go insane, because everything would become the same. Students also like to work together on projects. Some prefer traditional classes followed by exams. You need that variety.’