Abstract:

Online courses and virtual classrooms have been implemented by world-class universities in the last decades, to meet the needs of some students who live at distance, who are working, who have familial responsibilities or limited financial resources etc. During the COVID pandemic, a variety of educational institutions interrupted the traditional face-to-face instruction, moving almost overnight to online teaching. Compared with face-to-face instruction, online teaching and learning has a bad reputation in general public and in students’ informal conversations as well, being considered as being less effective. Despite some widespread preconceptions, available research proves that online learning could be at least as effective as the traditional face-to-face instruction when it is based on a carefully planned and developed instructional design. The aim of this study is to investigate students’ perceptions about online teaching and learning, the collected data being a valuable resource for planning and designing future instructional activities. An electronic survey has been applied to 243 students in educational sciences from the University of Alba Iulia, Romania. The survey was a research-generated instrument addressing four main aspects or domains of online teaching and learning: learner-content interaction, learner-instructor interaction, learner-technology interaction and learner-learner interaction. For each domain, the respondents had the opportunity to mention advantages/disadvantages/barriers and conditions of efficacy. The results were discussed in relation with those obtained in similar studies conducted in various social/educational/cultural contexts in an attempt to identify some general conditions of efficacy of online instructional designs.

Keywords:

Online teaching and learning, online instructional design, teaching and learning efficacy.