Students struggle in coming back to face-2-face teaching in evidence based good teaching settings

Abstract

Triggered by the Corona pandemic and the experience gained with online teaching as a result, questions are increasingly being asked today about the extent to which online teaching should continue to play a role in university teaching in the future. This raises the question of what actually characterizes good university teaching and which teaching formats enable good university teaching. Therefore, in this paper we would like to compile the research results from teaching-learning research regarding the quality of university teaching and from this compile overarching criteria of evidence-based good university teaching. Based on this, we would like to take a look at the research on the effectiveness of online teaching. Our thesis is that online teaching per se has no higher or lower effectiveness than face-to-face teaching, but rather that the quality of teaching formats is ensured by the implementation of the criteria of good teaching, which goes in different teaching formats. This leads to the hypothesis that university teaching can be effective and good in any teaching format if these criteria are taken into account. In order to test this hypothesis practically in a study of our own, a face-to-face course designed on the basis of findings about evidence-based good teaching was converted to a purely online format from one day to another. The switch from face-to-face to pure online was made without adapting the course materials or the didactic concept in the core. In this way, the evaluation results of both teaching formats could be directly compared. In addition, the evaluation results of these events were also compared with the evaluation results of all other events at the university in order to determine whether events that take evidence-based criteria of good teaching into account are really evaluated better. Finally, we switched in spring semester 2022 back to face-2-face teaching, again without any changes. What is good teaching anyway? How can we measure what good teaching is? Like many studies, including Ulrich (2020), we would like to define good teaching here: (1) as teaching that is well evaluated by students and (2) as teaching that is conducive to learning. Thus, in the first case, student evaluation results are used to elaborate criteria for good teaching; in the second case, learning success using grades or scores on achievement tests are used as variables for good teaching. To elaborate evidence-based criteria for good teaching, we consulted the syntheses of Schneider and Preckel (2017), of Ulrich (2020), and of Schneider and Mustafic (2015) and use the criteria of good teaching reported there. These have been compiled by the respective authors from meta-analyses. In total the evaluation of four semesters (approx. 800 students) pre COVID19 and three semesters (approx. 600 students) during COVID19 are compared and last post COVID19 the first semester (approx. 200 students). As a first outlook it can be said that the satisfaction during COVID19 remained as good as before, the learning success was slightly lower. Compared to all other courses, the gap became larger in the first semester, but this leveled out somewhat over the three semesters. To an overall higher rating. In the post COVID19 semester this changed. The evaluation became a bit worse as well as the evaluation.