“I want more videos, fewer books to read, but also a written script”: Are student preferences a moving target and is it a target worth aiming at?

Description

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to most learning activities of university students being moved to their private domain. This situation has resulted in a more individualized learning experience and a stronger focus on self-organized learning activities. As an integral part of learning scenarios, students typically have the opportunity to more freely organize their learning process (e.g., order of aspects of a topic they want to inform themselves about), and their preferred learning materials (e.g., using slides, lecture books, online videos, podcasts, and so on). Providing material that caters to each of these preferences is hardly possible. Therefore, the question arises whether a choice should be made (e.g., providing a written script) or whether the role of lecturers in this context should change to being a gatekeeper that paves the way towards appropriate learning material (e.g., by checking legitimacy of existing material rather than creating own materials)? To investigate this question, we conducted a quasi-experiment with a between-subject design as part of an introductory course on the foundations of digitalization for business students. Almost 200 students studied the basics of hardware, software, and network technology on their own with about half of these students using mostly reading materials, while the other half mostly used video content. We found differences in terms of their performance on a quiz and their satisfaction with the content. There was also a tendency to ask for the type of content that they were not provided with, which creates a challenge for lecturers to satisfy student needs.

Period	04 Nov 2021
Event title	I-HE 2021
Event type	Conference
Location	ItalyShow on map