New study explores student experience in online learning

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New study explores student experience in online learning

A study by researchers from RMIT University and the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City reveals the pressing needs of online learners and suggests ways that universities can build an engaging online learning environment.

According to Dr Nguyen Hoang Thuan, Senior Program Manager for Digital Business at RMIT University, the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically transformed the way many daily activities take place, including education.

“Online learning will be part of any future education. That’s why our research aimed to provide preliminary insights on how educational institutions can create a collaborative and engaging online learning environment,” he said.

The research, recently published in the book ‘COVID-19 and Education: Learning and Teaching in a Pandemic-Constrained Environment’ by Informing Science Press, is based on a qualitative case study of students in a Vietnamese university that fully shifted to online delivery in the first half of 2020 due to COVID-19.

By using the focus group technique with 20 undergraduate students, the study investigated the experience and thoughts of students about their online learning and what they would like to see improved in the future.

The three elements of online presence

RMIT Senior Lecturer Dr Pham Cong Hiep said that the research team employed the previously well-studied Community of Inquiry framework focusing on the three elements of ‘online presence’: teaching presence, cognitive presence and social presence.

Teaching presence relates to teaching design and facilitation of the online learning activities, which helps connect the students to the instructor and instructional materials.
Cognitive presence refers to linking the online lecture content with students’ existing knowledge, helping them gain new information and topic understanding.
Social presence is about helping online students feel connected to the whole learning group by trying to recreate a real-life social context.

The study shows that of the three online presence elements, students highly regarded the adequacy of teaching presence, which covers online infrastructure, learning management systems, and various online teaching modes. Students felt satisfied when they could have ongoing and reciprocated interactions with the instructors. Effective and frequent uses of social media tools between instructors and students, and between students were well acknowledged by the study participants to be essential to the online learning process.

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The newly published study from RMIT University and the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City provides preliminary insights on how educational institutions can create a collaborative and engaging online learning environment.

In terms of cognitive presence, lecture recordings and the availability of message histories during question-and-answer sessions enabled the students to review the content after the classes, and allowed students of different learning levels to cope with the course knowledge better.

However, to ensure the quality of the learning, students recognised that they needed more efforts themselves, including a higher sense of independence in finding answers, doing homework, and aggregating their knowledge.

Another noteworthy observation is that although the teaching has moved online, most assessments remain the same as in the face-to-face mode. According to the research team, this calls for comprehensive review of how university assessments should be adapted with respect to changing learning and teaching platforms, and the newly acquired skills of both students and instructors.

At the same time, the study recorded mixed responses towards social presence in online learning. Big class sizes and lack of prior personal contacts were found as the main reasons for lack of socialising.

“In our study, students who did not know each other struggled more in group work. We also found that certain assessments are not designed to require close collaboration between the students, lowering the need to develop social presence in online learning. This is a gap that instructors should seriously look at,” Dr Thuan said.

Dr Hiep remarked that “understanding students’ needs and assessing the effectiveness of provided resources are always important to maintain high-quality teaching, whether we are teaching online or offline.”

“Our study calls for further research on the tools, techniques, and best practices that can enhance online presence in digital learning, while not forcing excessive workload on educational instructors. As such, future studies should focus on the effective, customised implementation of online learning while taking into account resource constraints,” Dr Hiep concluded.

Story: Ngoc Hoang

Business and management

Media Release

13 July 2021