The students do have a point when it comes to quality, says Paul Kirschner, professor emeritus of educational psychology, who helped develop dozens of distance courses for the Open University. “Good distance education can be compared to an operating theater in an academic hospital, everything is well prepared and ready. I think online education is often emergency education, a kind of hospital in a war zone.”
Hardly any data is available about education in this corona period. VU University Amsterdam did, however, compare the results and experiences of students during the first wave with the years before. “It is striking that the motivation and satisfaction of students decreased, but the performance improved”, says Melanie Ehren, professor and director of the research institute. Learn!. “The richness of forms that we now offer may well ensure that we are better suited to different learning styles. It is true that the peak in performance is leveling off again, it is still difficult to sustain.”
“Teachers are doing their best and I take my hat off for that,” says Kirschner. “But most have never done this before. And that also applies to the students, they have not chosen this and are not used to it.” Still, Ehren thinks some form of ‘hybrid education’ would be good in the future. “We could do more online with knowledge clips for part of the education, especially the lectures. Then the online lectures could be more about interaction.”
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