Abstract:

Last academic year many universities faced new challenges during pandemic lockdowns and unexpected transition to distance learning (DL). Some organizational problems were caused by the urgency of such a transition, especially in universities with a considerable number of students. Other difficulties were connected with little experience of both teachers and students in using DL technologies. The situation teachers faced became an incentive to conduct surveys devoted to the analysis of students’ starting competences in DL and their progress during the period of training.

Modern students are digital natives so this sudden transition to DL was not supposed to cause difficulties with learning on a LMS chosen by their universities, or with getting or providing feedback either online or offline. However, in practice, DL implementation required additional special efforts: development of simplified instructions for students and teachers to connect to a particular course, upload tasks and answers; permanent monitoring of educational process; its analysis and current updates; timely changes of educational software if it was not efficient for a particular type of work.

Our previous experience proved that the platform SurveyMonkey and survey administration software Google Forms are very efficient online instruments not only for getting up-to-date information about the level of students’ competence to use DL technologies and to study on universities LMS or using other Internet resources, but also about students’ progress in this new educational reality. Thus, these services were used to conduct our surveys, which comprised about 500 people: about 300 Russian and 200 international students.

The first survey revealed that one of the most difficult aspects of DL organization was the work on a university LMS because of their user-unfriendly interfaces, difficulty of navigation, and the absence of mobile applications. As a result of this survey we arrived at the conclusion that a comprehensive solution of this problem is the necessity of development of an educational environment with user-friendly interface and supporting mobile application. The latter is of primary importance, as modern students prefer using their smartphones rather than computers.

The second survey conducted after three weeks of work in the DL mode showed that on the whole constant LMS usage promoted acquiring and developing students’ and teachers’ skills of work in the digital educational environment.

The results of the two surveys led us to the following conclusions:
1) students’ obvious digital literacy improved considerably,
2) when introducing DL technologies into the educational process, it is necessary to help students and teachers use them in order to prevent a decrease in the level of competences because of insufficient knowledge of DL technologies or inability to work under DL conditions, despite the fact that most students are digital natives,
3) achieving good DL competences required additional efforts on the part of students.

To improve the process of DL it is necessary to work out detailed questionnaires for students and teachers to reveal organizational drawbacks, find out preferred forms of providing information, control, assess, and also time students spend studying a particular discipline and curriculum as a whole. Special attention should be paid to studying teachers’ experience for promoting practical recommendations to continue DL education more efficiently.

Keywords:

Distant learning, survey, competence, recommendations.