New Blended Learning Enriched after the COVID-19 Experience? Students’ Opinions

Abstract

Online distance instruction (ODI), as a response to COVID-19 restrictions, had a great impact on education around the world. The main objective of the presented research is to monitor students’ opinions and answer the question of whether teachers enriched face-to-face lessons enhanced by digital technologies (i.e., blended learning) after the COVID-19 pandemic with the methods and tools that they used during ODI in the pandemic. Data were collected at selected upper secondary and higher education institutions for medical staff in the Czech Republic (N = 488) using online questionnaires in autumn 2021 (end of ODI) and in autumn 2022 (a year of blended learning). The questionnaires consisted of 35 items that required students’ opinions on the Likert scale, multiple-choice items with one or more answers, and open answers. The frequency of occurrence was monitored according to four criteria: (1) First contact and teacher-student communication, (2) learning content acquisition, (3) learning content delivery and assessment, (4) students’ final feedback on ODI. The results did not show much enrichment of blended learning using the experience from ODI. On the one hand, presentations were more frequently exploited in blended learning than in ODI. On the other hand, teachers did not use one channel to deliver study materials and conduct communication as they had done during ODI. We cannot deduce the reasons for teachers’ behavior from the collected data, but students were sure that these changes did not help them in learning.