This is an open access article under the terms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri bution-NonCo mmercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in Spring 2020, universities around the world have quickly adopted online teaching as an emergency measure. Informed by activity theory, the present qualitative case study aims to better understand the nature of the rapid institutional transition and its impact on academics' pedagogical experiences during this period. A multiple set of qualitative data was collected in a national university in South Korea that rapidly made the online transition, following government directives in February 2020. This article provides useful accounts of the changes that occurred in interconnected teaching activity systems at the university while adopting online teaching, highlighting the complex factors underpinning individual academics' experiences. The sudden shift in institutional teaching activities and conditions created a range of contradictions that were experienced as dilemmas by academics, the main subject of the activity systems. The results demonstrate that two groups of university faculty, separately identified as novice online teachers and expert online teachers, faced different dilemmas and challenges. An essential lesson learned from this analysis is the need for a more holistic, realistic, and sensitive approach to emergency teaching scenarios that may enable educational institutions to better respond to such emergencies in the future.

Aim/Purpose: Extant research provides conflicting information regarding the role that lecture behaviors play within e-learning lectures. This study sought to understand what role motivation plays in increasing the likelihood that students engage in lecture behaviors in general, and how motivation affects the differing types of lecture behaviors. Background: The growth of online learning has increased the importance of video lectures as a means of delivering content. As with offline lectures, students may find it useful to adapt and change the way they interact with lectures to improve their learning. One possible approach that allows students to effectively manage any challenges they have in understanding a lesson is to initiate lecture behaviors to alter the flow of information. Methodology: In the present study, a survey was administered to cyber university students (n = 2434) in order to examine at the relationship between intrinsic goal orientation (a type of motivation) and levels of lecture behaviors. Contribution: This research fills an important gap by showing the effects that motivation can have on how students interact with video lectures and suggests the ways in which students engaging in specific lecture behaviors do so in order to gain a better understanding of the content. As lecture behaviors are an important part of how students are interacting with this important and new method of teaching, it is important to understand which characteristics make students more likely to engage in lecture behaviors. Findings: Students who have higher levels of motivation are more likely to engage in lecture behaviors. These lecture behaviors may include splitting attention between media sources, pausing the video lecture, rewatching parts of the video lecture, and diverting attention to obtain better audio or visual clarity. Recommendations for Practitioners: Instead of just tracking students’ viewing progress on each course lecture video, instructors should further endeavor to measure their students’ use lecture behaviors in relation to online course lecture content. Doing so can provide valuable insight into students’ level of engagement with course lecture materials and overall levels of intrinsic goal orientation. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers need to start factoring in how student characteristics interact with instructional engagement when investigating online learning. Impact on Society: Improvement in our understanding of online learning helps improve the quality of instruction, which provides a net gain for society. Future Research: This paper is a broad overview using a survey, so future research should focus on a more detailed analysis of lecture behaviors, possibly using controlled experiments.

Ideally, instruction should be delivered in a way that reduces the processing of information that does not contribute to learning (extraneous load) and increases cognitive processing that contributes to learning (germane load). One way students might effectively manage extraneous load is through specific video lecture viewing strategies to control the flow of information. Extant research provides conflicting perspectives regarding the role of viewing strategies within video lectures in improving learning. This study analyzed survey responses from a group of university students (n = 2012) participating in online classes in South Korea and looked at the mediating effect of video lecture viewing strategies on the relationship between extraneous load and germane load. The results showed that viewing strategies mediated the relationship between extraneous load and germane load. When viewing strategies were added to the model, the large negative relationship between extraneous load and germane load reversed to become a small positive relationship, implying that the negative correlation between extraneous load and germane load can be largely mitigated by students engaging in specific viewing strategies to better understand the content.

While the benefits of shared note-taking during live lectures have been studied, the effects of shared note-taking in e-learning environments merit examination since such courses often feature asynchronous video lectures, allowing students to work together to construct notes over longer periods of time. A study (n=92) was conducted in the context of a flipped scientific writing course at a Korean university to investigate the effects of collaborative online note-taking on student learning. Students in the course were divided into two groups: members of the control were simply directed to view course videos and take notes individually, and members of the experimental group were asked to take collaborative notes in a shared online document. Student learning performance was measured through six online quizzes related to the course video lectures and through six related individual writing assignments. No differences were found in the learning outcomes of the control and the collaborative note-taking groups. However, significantly higher scores on related online quizzes and individual writing assignments were found in groups who took notes actively and for individuals who were major contributors to the group notes.

Note-taking is a commonly applied pedagogical strategy across all areas of education. In higher education specifically, there has been an increasing push to get students involved in collaborative note-taking in order to increase their engagement with the contents and to inspire deeper and more meaningful learning. However, there is a lack of clarity as to whether collaborative note-taking positively influences student performance. For this reason, the present study (n = 189) compares the learning performances of students in a collaborative note-taking condition to those of students in an individual note-taking condition. The students were compared in regards to their retention of information and their performance on academic writing. The study found that students from the collaborative note-taking group performed better on measures of retention, while the individual notetaking group performed better on measures of academic writing. These results suggest that while the collaborative processes of group notetaking lead students to retain more information, these processes do not lead to better performance in academic writing. The present study fills a gap in the research by showing how the effectiveness of collaborative note-taking might depend on the learning context or on the desired result of the class.

No abstract

Technical universities are constantly experimenting with innovative student-centred classroom approaches. We describe flipped and linked classroom approaches in the context of our ongoing chemical education theme of catalysis.