Suddenly fully online: A case study of a blended university course moving online during the Covid-19 pandemic

This study investigates the way students experience synchronous online and offline meetings in university education, using a qualitative approach. The context is a course in teacher training that was forced to go fully online during the Covid-19 pandemic while the course was almost halfway to completion. After completion of the course, a semi-structured interview on the experiences during the online and offline synchronous meetings was conducted with six randomly selected students out of a total of 24. The interview was transcribed, coded, and second coding was performed. The results reveal that students generally prefer offline meetings because of higher levels of all types of student interactions (student-student, student-content, and student-teacher), and the higher level of relatedness. However, students do appreciate the possibility to perform small group work outside of class in an online environment. The results support the application of blended learning. Implications are discussed.