Will Online Learning Become a New Norm in Higher Education?

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has been seen by some as the event that will finally make online delivery become a dominant mode in universities. This study reports the preferences of students for online teaching, collaboration, and assessment using survey data gathered after a lengthy period of full online delivery and at a time when students were free to choose conventional, online and hybrid approaches to learning, collaboration and assessment. Most previous research has explored student preferences with respect to specific courses or at the institutional level, but the present study examines students’ preferences with respect to their discipline: arts, science and technology, business, hospitality and mathematics. Analyses revealed that students prefer conventional lectures providing that recordings are made available online, but that students prefer small group teaching, collaborative work, assessment, support and other activities to be delivered conventionally. These preferences were broadly similar across students drawn from the different discipline areas, but there was also some variation between the disciplines. Overall the findings suggest that students prefer conventional on-campus teaching, learning and assessment to full online delivery.