What Form of Online Teaching Do High School Students Prefer?

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, teaching has moved overnight from a traditional classroom setting to a virtual setting. This has been a great challenge for students, and especially for teachers. Most teachers have not had a lot of experience teaching in a virtual setting. In the course of only a few days, teachers were forced to fully devise and organize teaching subjects without receiving any particular training. Previously, numerous advantages and disadvantages of online teaching compared to traditional forms of teaching have been elaborated. There are three basic forms of online teaching: synchronous teaching, asynchronous teaching based on materials prepared in advance and individually tutoring students. The paper describes research involving 56 9th grade student concerning their attitudes towards online teaching and preferred forms of online teaching. The results suggest students slightly prefer traditional forms of teaching over online teaching. In addition, students appear to favor the asynchronous form of online teaching based on recorded resources as well as teacher availability for prompt feedback. Overall, the conclusion is that, despite some disadvantages of online teaching, it also has some positive features that can possibly be retained in the future.