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We are living in unprecedented times in higher education (HE). Covid-19 has brought challenges in how we socially interact, teach and engage with our students (see further details in Hodges et al., 2020). Learning technologies and HE have not been the best of friends over the past two decades. What once was fearfully and critically looked at by lecturers, has now, as a result of the pandemic, been used as a necessity to ensure that learning, teaching and assessment can be performed. According to Baldwin, the shift from physical teaching and learning to online delivery 'has likely been no less of a culture shock' for lecturers and students (2021, p. 3).
Although technological developments have been introduced in HE as quickly as they have been introduced in society, they were often introduced by individual academics through small research projects or scholarly initiatives (Casanova & Price, 2018). Traditional HE has been built over the years on the strong foundations of face-to-face delivery, where students and lecturers participate and interact synchronously in a physical environment, frequently with little enhancement by technology. Investments are typically made in the learning spaces, the buildings' quality, the libraries and technological infrastructure to ensure students are connected both on campus and when they are at home. Learning technologies have been seen as a support for learning, as mechanisms to ensure that assessments are more transparent and accessible and as means to ensure communication is sent to students (McGee, 2014). However, everything has changed with the pandemic, and HE institutions had to rethink how they approach their pedagogic practice. Emergency remote teaching became a new concept adopted worldwide (Adedoyin & Soykan, 2020; Hodges et al., 2020). It is a form of teaching and learning delivery that replicates existing face-to-face practices into synchronous online delivery using videoconferencing systems, until then only used by academics for meetings or, occasionally, academic conferences.
The lack of pedagogical competencies to embrace remote teaching (Salmon, 2005; Taylor & McQuiggan, 2008) and the lack of time and planning across HE meant that academics had to improvise aiming to mirror their face-to-face lectures with online lectures and webinars, arguably not conducive to effective and quality distance learning (Hodges et al., 2020). These approaches aimed not to create a robust and sustainable new educational ecosystem but to provide a temporary solution during an emergency. It lacked planning, a strategic overview, a learning design approach, and above all, clear expectations about the lecturers’ and students’ roles (Casanova & Price, 2018). It is clear for those who have been researching this field that remote teaching is not, in any shape or form, similar to a good and well-designed online learning experience, nor it should aim to be (Hodges et al., 2020). They are founded on very different principles and structures of support.
One of the main challenges with the transition to remote teaching was synchronous active and collaborative learning. Videoconferencing solutions seem capable of responding to lecture-based teaching formats, but they lack the ability to foster collaboration and co-production. Although video conferencing tools, such as Zoom or Google Meet, improved over the months to ensure group discussions were possible, they are not designed to conduct group work. This paper looks at how synchronous active and collaborative learning activities were conducted remotely for a postgraduate project management module. This study will compare how students evaluate that experience relative to a similar face-to-face experience already evaluated in a previous study (see further details by the authors in Tan & Huet, 2021). This research aims to respond to the two following research questions: