Abstract
The sudden impact of the COVID-19 pandemic challenged universities to provide students with online teaching and learning settings that were both immediately applicable and supportive of quality learning. This resulted in a broad variety of synchronous and asynchronous online settings of teaching and learning. While some courses balanced both kinds, others offered either predominantly synchronous or asynchronous teaching and learning. In a survey study with students (N=3,056) and teachers (N=396) from a large German university, we explored whether a predominance of synchronous or asynchronous teaching and learning settings in higher education was associated with certain student experiences and outcomes. Additionally, we examined how well these two types of teaching and learning settings support students’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness proposed by self-determination theory (SDT). Data were collected after the first online semester due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The results imply that from the students’ perspective, the teaching methods involved in the two settings of teaching and learning differ with regard to their potential to support social interaction and to support basic psychological needs as proposed by SDT. Students who studied mostly in synchronous settings reported more peer-centered activities such as feedback in comparison to students in mostly asynchronous settings. In contrast, teachers perceived fewer differences between teaching methods in synchronous and asynchronous settings, especially regarding feedback activities. Further, students in mostly synchronous settings reported greater support of their basic psychological needs for competence support and relatedness as well as a greater overall satisfaction with the online term compared to students in mostly asynchronous settings. Across all students, greater fulfillment of psychological needs and higher technology acceptance coincided with outcomes that are more favorable. Implications for the post-pandemic classroom are drawn.
Highlights
The sudden need to adapt to online teaching and learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic challenged the digital readiness of teachers and students all over the world (Bao, 2020; Crawford et al, 2020; Demuyakor, 2020; Händel et al, 2020; International Association of Universities, 2020)
(1a) To answer the research question how synchronous and asynchronous teaching and learning settings are characterized by students and teachers regarding the applied teaching methods, we first viewed the reported frequencies as a function of the two teaching and learning settings
Students in mostly synchronous settings reported higher gains in methodological skills. These results complement the findings by Nguyen (2021), who found that students prefer synchronous settings. While these results suggest a superiority of synchronous teaching and may be interpreted in such way that more video conferences are needed in higher education, one could conclude that for the particular case of emergency remote teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers had difficulties tapping the full potential of asynchronous teaching and learning arrangements
Summary
The sudden need to adapt to online teaching and learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic challenged the digital readiness of teachers and students all over the world (Bao, 2020; Crawford et al, 2020; Demuyakor, 2020; Händel et al, 2020; International Association of Universities, 2020). In ERT, almost all face-to-face teaching was substituted through online teaching formats (Zawacki-Richter, 2020; Cicha et al, 2021; Goertz and Hense, 2021) This transition was accompanied by the awareness that the pedagogy needed to be adapted to the new medium in the sense that moving pedagogy from one medium into another was not enough to ensure quality learning (Henriksen et al, 2020). In a study prior to the pandemic, Daigle and Stuvland (2020) found this lack to account for differences between modalities regarding, for example, lower satisfaction with online learning They described this as the social presence gap and claimed that teachers should invest in overcoming this gap to equalize outcomes across modalities. These findings stress the importance to carefully consider students’ learning experience when tackling the question of how to engage them in online learning
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