Abstract:

Over the last decades, flexible online learning offers in higher education have increased access to institutions of higher education for non-traditional populations and thus equity in education. However, despite the advancement of research into online learning and the continuous development of technologies to support flexible online learning catering for the needs of diverse students, certain challenges remain as regards student support and motivation. These challenges have been highlighted again especially during the period of emergency remote teaching (Hodges et al. 2020) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The case study presented in this paper describes and analyses a set of recently developed approaches to tackle these challenges in an online study program of social work, within the framework of a three-year publicly funded development project, named “HiFlex, HiTech, HiTouch (H3) – Enabling Study Success by Flexible Acquisition of Competencies and Learning Settings”. The online study program is offered jointly by a network of eight higher educational institutes across Germany. It targets practitioners in the field of social work who lack a formal degree or training, but who can enroll in the program, study alongside their job in a combination of online modules and face-to-face lessons and can thus obtain a bachelor’s degree in social work. This flexible online learning offer has been established successfully for nearly 20 years (Arnold et al. 2018); yet at the end of the pandemic, the program’s steering committee identified three main challenges that called for further development.

The three challenges concerned the following dimensions of flexible learning (cf. Li & Wong 2018)

(1) Need for enhanced flexibility as regards time & place: Students find it increasingly difficult to participate fully within the face-to-face modules due to stressful work situations, care obligations or personal difficulties. At the same time, due to the quick rise of highly functional video-conferencing possibilities during the pandemic, students longed for more synchronous online meetings within the online modules that were previously designed as an entirely asynchronous learning setting.
(2) Need for enhanced flexibility as regards instructional approaches & content delivery: diverse learners need different learning resources and possibilities to personalize their learning environment in terms of how they interact with the learning content, peer learners and teachers to exchange ideas and receive feedback.
(3) Need for enhanced flexibility as regards support in self-regulated learning & motivation: Self-organized online learning requires a high command of time management, goal setting and keeping up one’s motivation to follow through with a study program.

The case study will present the preliminary results of the development project H3. It will share
(1) the pilot implementations of the innovative digital instructional approaches used (e.g. personalized learning environments, digitalized competence and resource analysis to foster study motivation, hybrid learning settings, game-based delivery of learning content etc.),
(2) initial evaluation results,
(3) measures taken to embed the new approaches into the study program as well as
(4) a critical reflexional as regards the pitfalls of integrating these new dimensions of flexibility into the online study program of social work.

Keywords:

Online learning, higher education, study motivation, personal learning environments, game-based learning.