Learning Strategies Among Students During a Sudden Transition to Online Teaching in a PBL University

Increasing use of digital tools in university teaching has drawn scholarly attention to the interaction between pedagogical design and digital technologies. The accelerated transition to online learning following the COVID-19 crisis has raised several questions regarding the links between technological affordances and learning strategies, especially with regard to the role of dialogue in learning. Based on a survey of 51 postgraduate students in a Danish university with Problem Based Learning as explicit teaching strategy, where collaborative interaction and dialogue are regarded as integral to learning, this study investigates how students navigated the altered learning environment. We found that students’ experiences with online teaching demonstrate reduced affordances for learning. They experienced decreased co-involvement in decision-making, decreased collaboration and a changed pedagogical setup that did not support learning through discursive meaning negotiations. Thus, whilst dialogues can be transformed by digital technology, these changes are not necessarily productive within an environment which emphasises democratic discourse. Arguably, the digital transformation will continue to evolve and influence the quality of university teaching. Our paper concludes by discussing the potential of democratic dialogic teaching to stimulate learning ecologies in online and hybrid learning environments.