BEIJING, March 09, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The epidemic prevents college students from going back to campus across China. Instead of waiting for the end of the epidemic, Tsinghua University decided to shift all the courses online and start teaching as scheduled.
Faculty deliver their lectures or teaching designs lively through online learning platform—the Rain Classroom and video conference platforms, and tried many technologies to interact with students.
It is the first time in history that an elite traditional campus-based university shifts totally online.
Two academic weeks have passed and the entire online teaching went smoothly, with the enormous effort from every stakeholder, i.e., the university leadership, faculty, staff and students.
Such unusual natural experiment gives education researchers a great opportunity to collect evidence and address important questions that cannot be answered before. Can online education evoke the reform of education paradigm?
The key feature about Tsinghua’s move is that No.1 NO classes and No. 2 it is in China, where online education is not formalized. Now that the current online technology can well support most education, why haven’t people in traditional universities tried to teach totally online? Authorities have had concerns regarding technologies and online education, such as the robustness and convenience of technology and the potential negative impact on education quality. Although numerous researchers have been done to address these concerns, people still prefer the way they are used to. The unique online education shock provides great opportunity to for every faculty and student to experience online teaching and learning in their formal courses. Whether online education can evoke the reform of university education, or how may the future education paradigm look like, depends on people’s true experience and foresight based on that.
This essay reviews experiences from different stakeholders and discusses the potential of upcoming reform of education paradigm.
Students: generally positive experience with mixed evidence
Student’s learning experiences and learning outcomes are among the most important factors in evaluating online education quality. According to several surveys conducted by different colleges in Tsinghua, students reported very positive learning experiences. Around 40% to 55% students felt that online teaching and traditional face-to-face teaching are equivalent in terms of general teaching quality. Around 15% to 30% of students reported that synchronous online learning is better than traditional learning. Around 30% of students thought that traditional learning outperforms live online learning.
The most helpful component of synchronous online learning includes reviewing video- or audio tapes recorded by online learning platforms together with slides, and interactions with instructors through online tools such as quiz, danmaku, or virtual interactions in video conference rooms.
Students also report positive online experience in terms of enjoying a better view facing own’s laptop than watching a screen in the classroom, not being disturbed by other students around, feeling relax at home, and etc.
Although some said that they felt it was easier to focus during live online learning, others reported that they experienced difficulty to focus. Internet speed and the robustness of software are the two key factors which affect enjoyable learning.
Nevertheless, their remains too early to determined the quality of learning outcomes. Students with learning difficulties might also be ignored because teachers cannot notice them, but this is always a challenge issue even in face-to-face teaching.
Faculty: better experience than imagined, but need more teaching strategy design
Many faculty found themselves very excited to participate in synchronous online teaching after they became familiar with various online tools. Some senior faculty also found the online teaching experience was not as bad as they had imagined, even in highly interactive small classes.
Although there is obviously a lot of work in adjusting course design to suit the new context and a lot of time was spent on exploring online technology, many faculty still have strong motivation to update their course, because it’s more accessible by both colleagues and the public. Learning-analytics-based course design should have a larger power in facilitating teaching and learning, but it seems like teachers have not yet made full use of that, due to many reasons. Course assessment, especially closed book tests, might be difficult to be shift online. Courses which heavily relying on lab experiments are also difficulty to deliver online, although a few courses can use simulation systems.
University administration: more efficient but better quality assurance needed
University administration systems and governance structures may be the most obvious ones to benefit from online education and online office technologies. Taking advantage of the consensus to online education, the administration system, including routine meetings, administrative procedures, can all go online, and may become more efficient and easier. The university may need to provide more professional student support and teacher professional development support to adopt a new administrative arrangements. Regarding education, there remains little quality assurance in online learning. The leadership should also be cautious on digital divide and education equity issues regarding disadvantaged students.
Society: enjoy the positive externality of elite university resources
What’s the benefit and cost of the society when elite universities adopt a totally online education system? Breaking the boundary of elite universities to the entire society might be the most significant benefit. Tsinghua offered clone courses to Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) at Wuhan, and students from HUST could enjoy the live courses from Tsinghua at home. More quality education resources will be easier to produce, improving higher education equity for the entire society. Life-long education of citizens will also benefit from it. However, a well-done online learning scheme is hugely expensive regarding the online systems and huge amount of faculty work.
In summary, the crisis brought the elite traditional campus-based universities a unique opportunity to experience totally online education, without which such trial is impossible. The generally positive experiences from stakeholders are very valuable to imagine a new education paradigm, yet a lot of creative efforts are needed to address the potential concerns and issues that already emerged.
Contact:
Laura LIN Email: yuanlin@tsinghua.edu.cn