Abstract:

During the last decades a need has emerged to redefine the concept of “distance learning”, considering it as an education that takes place in different moments and at different places, thus allowing students to choose where and when to learn and where to find learning resources. These changes led to new forms of learning related to online resources and procedures. In particular, online-only universities have transformed and adapted their offline, non-presential teaching towards online learning. Furthermore, MOOCs and their derivatives have emerged as a very powerful way to learn, both for initial higher education, and for continued education. Traditional universities (i.e., most higher-education systems) have embraced online teaching and learning at different levels of involvement. New challenges related to blended learning have appeared : flipped classrooms, e-Learning experiences, mobile-learning activities, online/virtual laboratories, Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), gamification, etc. All these new teaching and learning experiences seem to be an efficient way to enhance higher education’s mission, yet the road to implementing innovative processes in this field has found some resistance both at instructor and body governance levels. Semipresential studies (besides blended learning) is another way to enter the realm of online learning. However, one must note that public perception of the usefulness of online, blended and partially online learning does not bear a clear idea by society.

Teaching and learning are changing every day, in a very fast way, so there is no time to assess the new challenges. From our team (innovative network in teaching virtualization at the University of Girona), we were able to assess the key perceptions about virtualization (in the sense of non-classroom teaching) by those two collectives of people involved in teaching and learning: students and teachers. They were asked what they considered as virtualizing the learning/teaching, where teachers and students may not have the same answer.

Relating to this subject, they were also asked about their preferences in virtual teaching:
- virtual or face-to-face supervising?
- Or what about lectures?
- Do they prefer them with or without professor?
- And exercises?
- It is enough to upload them to the website/Moodle?

Although these students are studying in a face-to-face university, they appreciate to self-manage their studies by doing the activities any place, any time. However, to our surprise, many students think that traditional, blackboard-based lectures are still valid, and that online activities might be rather limited to sharing of educational resources. In that sense, students and teachers differ from what might be expected from the ideas and expectations of innovative groups in higher education

Moreover, this communication will try to provide new ideas on the concept of teaching virtualization both in time and in space, related to semipresentiality and to online-only courses. The results of the survey, in the form of perceptions, which are different from expected outcomes, allow us to propose some changes that may lead to somewhat disrupting university studies.

Keywords:

Teaching Virtualization, Semipresentiality, Online, Blended Teaching.