From digitalized education to Covid-19 restricted education: Challenges and differences

At the department of Information technologies at Åbo Akademi University, the digitalization of education was being performed with the objective of being able to give higher quality education to an increasing number of students but using the same level of teaching personnel resources. In this work, several actions were performed, such as recording lectures and editing recorded lectures, testing out different systems for automatic grading of exercises, different formats of giving the lectures themselves (such as a flipped classroom). When almost a year of these activities had been performed, the Covid-19 crisis forced a fast change in how teaching was being done at universities all over the world.

This paper analysis, with the support of a survey and interview performed, how the transformation to 100% online teaching was performed, knowing that a lot of efforts had been made earlier to digitalize the education. The paper explains the challenges still remaining and analyzes the feasibility of totally remote education. We analyze the difference between a digitalized education and a Covid-19 restricted education, regarding teaching and student motivation, tools being used, dropout rates, and communication issues. The papers also give conclusions on things that both worked well and did not work well in this transformation.