Abstract:

The COVID-19 global pandemic significantly affected higher education systems and accelerated an existing shift to flipped and blended learning. Results are presented from a four-year project to investigate and understand how undergraduate physics students at Imperial College London perceived hybrid teaching and online learning. Students and staff have been asked about their experience of a range of online teaching formats including, lectures, seminars, tutorials, and laboratory courses, which were taught with a mix of simultaneous and asynchronous activities. These outcomes are compared with the 2021-2022 academic year, in which learning was returned to in-person and included lectures delivered using a blended methodology, utilising both recorded lectures and in-person sessions.
The data has been used to appraise blended learning in higher education physics with regards to the student experience, learning autonomy and depth of conceptual understanding. We report extremely mixed experiences amongst the student cohort regarding forced rapid shift to online learning during the pandemic. While many students seemed to deeply engage with online lecture material, and perhaps learned from it better than in traditional face-to-face teaching there was a nevertheless a very strong feeling from the student body that they wanted to return to have a component of traditional style lecturing once the pandemic was over. Accordingly. the return to face-to-face teaching has seen greater lecture attendance, and more student engagement in real time during sessions.

Keywords:

Blended learning, online learning, hybrid learning.