How do ICT engineering students experience online teaching and learning?

Abstract

Due to Covid-19 pandemic, universities were forced to quickly shift from on campus operations to online teaching and learning. At Tampere University of Applied Sciences (acronym TAMK) online teaching was implemented with a few days’ notice in March 2020. Since then, teaching has been organized mainly online. As online teaching and learning continues, concerns about students have grown. The aim of this study was to explore TAMK’s ICT engineering students’ learning experience, academic success, wellbeing and studying motivation during Covid-19 pandemic. An online survey was sent to all ICT Engineering student at TAMK in March 2021. The survey focused on students’ experience related to online teaching and learning. For designing the survey questions related to motivation factors, Pintrich et al. [1] Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (acronym MSLQ) was applied.

A total of 127 ICT engineering students responded to the survey. The results emerged concerns such as two-thirds of respondents experienced that their motivation to study has decreased during the academic year 2020-2021. Additionally, almost 50 % of the respondents experienced that ‘I have done a less work with my studies during online teaching and learning than in the past’ and 60 % felt that they haven't reached the same expertise during online teaching than they would have reached in face-to-face teaching. However, the respondents were mainly satisfied with the way in which online teaching has been implemented.