An Empirical Study on Students’ Academic Wellbeing and Sustainable Development in Live Webcast Classes

Huani Liu,Yifan Lyu,Haorong Zhu,Minjuan Wang,Hengling Wan

doi:10.3390/su13020501

Abstract

In recent years, live webcast classes have been increasingly used in China as an approach to alleviating educational poverty through equal access to high-quality education. Many schools in impoverished areas have managed to increase their proportions of students entering college by introducing the new model. While celebrating improved learning outcomes of a small percentage of students, educators should also be concerned about the overall academic wellbeing and sustainable development of less successful students. In the present study, academic wellbeing was conceptualized as a multidimensional construct covering seven dimensions, namely Empathy, Support, Responsiveness, Reliability, Tangibility, Self-efficacy and Buoyancy. Data were collected from 136 twelfth-grade students who had studied in live webcast classes. The results show that the overall academic wellbeing in live webcast classes was consistent among students of different academic performance levels, but the specific dimensions of academic wellbeing that they think mostly need improvement varied among different student groups. The findings of this study suggest that learner wellbeing and sustainability can be enhanced by closer collaboration between live webcast instructors and local teachers in instructional materials design, exercise and test questions’ compilation, as well as students’ self-study facilitation. The degree to which a local teacher should be involved in classroom teaching depends on the students’ academic level and learning needs.

Highlights

Over the past decades, a consistent effort has been made by the Chinese government to reduce poverty, as demonstrated in programmatic documents for guiding poverty alleviation work such as the “Seven-Year Priority Poverty Alleviation Program (1994–2000)”and the “National Program for Rural Poverty Alleviation (2001–2010)”
Before rating the 22 statements in the questionnaire, the respondents were requested to answer five multiple choice questions: (a) What are the benefits of attending live webcast classes? (b) Which school subjects have you learned in live webcast classes? (c) Did live webcast classes help improve your academic performance? If yes, (d) what do you think are the reasons? If not, (e) what do you think are the reasons?
Over a third of the respondents said that live webcast classes helped consolidate their fundamental knowledge, and another third said the new teaching model tapped into their learning potential, enabling them to acquire much more advanced knowledge than they would have in local classes

Summary

Introduction

A consistent effort has been made by the Chinese government to reduce poverty, as demonstrated in programmatic documents for guiding poverty alleviation work such as the “Seven-Year Priority Poverty Alleviation Program (1994–2000)”and the “National Program for Rural Poverty Alleviation (2001–2010)”. In July 2013, an educational poverty alleviation initiative was introduced by China’s Ministry of Education and three other departments, aiming to enhance sustainability efforts and eradicate poverty by elevating educational quality in poor areas [2]. Within this context, a new educational model—the Live Webcast Teaching. Model—was introduced and turned out to be successful in addressing the long-standing problem of educational resource scarcity in China’s poverty-stricken areas. The model was initially established by several online schools in Beijing in the late.

Methods

Results

Conclusion