A Comparison of Undergraduate Students’ Perception of Tutorials Before and During the COVID-19: A Case of the University of Kwazulu-Natal in the Discipline of Public Governance

Abstract

Enhancing students’ learning experience through support structures such as tutorial sessions is essential. Students attending the tutorial sessions within the Discipline of Public Governance have never been given the opportunity to provide feedback on the sessions they have attended. They only get a chance to evaluate their lecturers using closed and open-ended questions to capture their learning experiences about modules’ structure, content, delivery and assessments. This implied a need to explore the students’ perceptions about the tutorial sessions during the normal conditions and under severe conditions like this of COVID-19. The quantitative approach was utilised and the data was collected through the distribution of questionnaires to the undergraduate students. The participants attended tutorials within the Discipline of Public Governance during the first semester of the year 2020. The study findings indicated that tutorial sessions occupy a critical role in students' development and learning. It is the platform for the students to easily interact with other students, discuss issues, and improve their performance. The study recommends that higher education institutions invest in the tutorial structure as one of the student support systems as it produces positive results in enhancing student learning. Redefining and reviewing the tutorial support structure is always crucial to improve the tutorial sessions' quality.

Exploring the Migration to a Digitalised Curriculum at UKZN

“…. " [40]. "Before the implementation of Moodle, the teaching and learning trial which became known as the dry-run was conducted from 18 May 2020 to 22 June 2020 .…”

“…This content is internationally standardised to be searched and downloaded per research engines used for scholarly research. A performance-based DC is driven by the prescribed specialised content that must be mastered by students for "enhancing learning and improving the academic performance of the students" [40]. The content for other modules was reduced because of the limited time for the 2020 academic year.…”

“…Students were given several opportunities of resubmitting their assessment tasks until they achieved their module learning outcomes. Although this process of repeating assessment tasks was good for students because it increased the number of students who passed the modules, it overloaded or overwhelmed academics, who had to repeat the teaching and marking of tasks several times [40].…”

“…Facilitation was the role played by academics who coordinated the content used by students to achieve module learning outcomes [43]. Other students supplied specific content generated to influence the learning processes according to their needs [40]. Most of the students valued their fellow students' knowledge over that of the tutors when the tutors were involved [4].…”

“…The CDA is a process or system of collecting and analysing published documents in order to understand the underpinning experiences of the actions that have taken place [18,38]. This study purposively and conveniently selected the 11 most accessible publications [10,12,17,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46] on migration published at the UKZN during the COVID-19 revolution to be analysed as data sources. Google Scholar was used to search for these publications.…”