Inter-university online courses as possible approach to improve teaching during crisis: a Ukrainian case study

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INTERUNIVERSITY ONLINE COURSES AS POSSIBLE APPROACH TO IMPROVE TEACHING DURING CRISIS: A UKRAINIAN CASE STUDY

Maria Bayliak, Oleksandra Abrat, Halyna Shmihel,

Volodymyr Lushchak, Volodymyr Shvadchak

Abstract

education university online course

The war launched by Russia has created new challenges for universities, including massive student migration abroad and massive displacement of students within Ukraine from the frontline areas. Many students lost access to quality education or had their studies interrupted by the war. Recognizing these problems, universities are trying to find different solutions. One such approach may be to introduce inter-university online courses that will be recognized by partner universities. In this case study, we analyze the effectiveness of inter-university online courses as an approach to restoring education for students severely affected by the war and as a way to maintain the quality of education in small groups at universities. The online course "Integrated Life Science Course" was taken for analysis, which was taught both to biology students from different universities in Ukraine within the framework of the educational project supported by German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Using statistics on course registration and attendance, as well as interview methodology, we assessed students' motivation to participate in this online course, course satisfaction, and learning outcomes, and identified shortcomings and pitfalls to avoid in similar courses. The survey and the results of the final test show that the main motivator for students to register and study at the course was the desire to gain new knowledge for further professional growth. A scholarship was also an important argument to enroll in the course; however, it did not impact the motivation of students to study. The fraction of students that successfully passed the final exam (~70%) was equal in the cohorts that had and had not been awarded scholarships. Thus, the scholarship was not a motivator to complete the course and successfully pass the exam to receive the certificate. Therefore, in order for such courses to be productive and effective, it is necessary to emphasize student motivation during selecting procedure.

Keywords; online learning, motivation, higher education, assessment, small academic group, war.

Анотація

Байляк Марія, Абрат Олександра, Шмігель Галина, Лущак Володимир, Швадчак Володимир. Міжуніверситетські онлайн-курси як можливий підхід до покращення викладання під час кризи: український кейс

Повномасштабне вторгнення росії в Україну стало рушієм нових викликів для українських університетів, оскільки спричинило масову міграцію студентів за кордон або всередині країни. Через війну багато студентів або втратили доступ до якісної освіти, або перервали навчання. Усвідомлюючи ці труднощі, університети шукають ефективні шляхи їх вирішення. Одним із підходів до вирішення освітніх проблем, пов'язаних із втратами якості освіти та/або міграцією студентів, може бути запровадження міжуніверситетських онлайн-курсів, які будуть викладатися та визнаватися у межах декількох університетів-партнерів. У цьому тематичному дослідженні здійснено аналіз ефективності одного із міжуніверситетських онлайн-курсів як підходу до відновлення освіти для студентів, які серйозно постраждали від війни, і як способу підтримання якості освіти в університетах з малокомплектними групами. Для аналізу було взято інтегрований онлайн-курс «Науки про життя», який викладали студентам-біологам з різних університетів України в рамках освітнього проєкту, підтриманого Німецькою службою академічних обмінів (DAAD). Використовуючи статистику реєстрації та відвідування курсу, а також дані опитувань, оцінено мотивацію студентів до участі в цьому онлайн-курсі, результати навчання та ставлення до курсу. Опитування та результати фінального тесту показали, що мотивацією для студентів, які зареєструвалися та навчалися на курсі, було бажання отримати нові знання для подальшого професійного зростання. Стипендія слугувала важливим аргументом для зарахування на курс, але не зіграла ролі в мотивації навчатися під час проходження курсу. Відсоток студентів, що успішно здали іспит (~70%), не залежав від наявності у них стипендії. Тому для того, щоб такі курси були продуктивними та ефективними, необхідно робити акцент на мотивації студентів під час відбору на курс. На основі аналізу проведеного онлайн-курсу також було окреслено недоліки та помилки, яких варто уникати в майбутньому на подібних курсах.

Ключові слова: онлайн-навчання, мотивація, вища освіта, оцінювання, малокомплектні групи, війна.

INTRODUCTION

The large-scale war started in 2022 has seriously disrupted university education in Ukraine. It not only forced students and teachers to leave their homes and destroyed the infrastructure but also led to a lot of damage that is less visible. The latter includes: 1) disruption of the educational process and consequent reduction in the quality of education; 2) decrease in the number of students willing to study in Ukrainian universities due to both student emigration and the possibility of studying abroad. Thus, the war has exacerbated the problem that existed before, namely the problem of small groups in unpopular, non-prestigious "difficult" specialties at universities. Recognizing these problems, universities are trying to find different approaches to solving them. One such approach may be to introduce inter-university online courses that will be recognized by partner universities. In this study, we analyze an example of the implementation of such a course for students-biologists in the framework of education project supported by German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in the framework program "Ukraine digital: Ensuring academic success in times of crisis".

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Introducing online learning (OL) is one of the ways to address the first educational problem mentioned above. Nowadays, OL is a global trend in education (Liang & Chen, 2012; Blyznyuk et al., 2021; Malimon et al., 2022). It has become an integral part of both modern life and education. Its significant advantage is that it provides an opportunity to study for a large number of students at once, regardless of their location (Duszenko et al., 2022). Online learning makes it easier for students who have been physically injured or have disabilities to participate in the learning process. In addition, OL is safer in times of war and allow to keep learning for students displaced due to different emergencies as the danger of missile and artillery shelling. As a rule, online learning is much cheaper than traditional education due to lower costs for travel, accommodation and organization of the actual educational process (Malimon et al., 2022; Dziubanovskyi et al., 2020). Its advantages also include high accessibility, flexibility, interactivity, and technology (Liang & Chen, 2012; Blyznyuk et al., 2021; Duszenko et al., 2022).

Despite its progressive nature, OL has a number of drawbacks (Liang & Chen, 2012; Duszenko et al., 2022). Therefore, it is not equally effective for all specialties. Recently, there have been more and more opponents of distance education in the medical field (Duszenko et al., 2022). This issue is especially acute for surgical students. The opponents OL believe that it is impossible to learn practical skills, which are the main component of training future doctors, in this way (Dziubanovskyi et al., 2020). If we develop the topic of medical education, and not higher education in general, we must agree that online learning cannot fully replace clinical training. At the same time, it should be noted that in extreme conditions, such as war or pandemic, distance learning technologies can also be used in medical institutions. In particular, artificial intelligence, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies have made a revolutionary breakthrough in online education. Interactive models, reconstructions of organs, reproduction of information on the screen in 3D projection, simulators based on VR technologies can already be used to train doctors and more (Al-Balas et al., 2022).

Summarizing the above, we can say that the challenges raised in 2022 during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine were largely met almost immediately by educational institutions, thanks to the previous experience with online learning of Ukrainian students and teachers during the Covid 19 pandemic (Blyznyuk et al., 2021). Therefore, today and in the future, OL allows to some extent to compensate for the forced interruptions of the educational process during the war in those universities where the participants of the educational process are in relative safety.

The transition to online learning itself was not a big challenge for universities, the challenge was to ensure a high level of quality of online learning. It has become a challenge for teachers to teach under fire or as internally displaced persons, where you think about meeting basic needs first and foremost. Another problem is the mass migration of students not only within Ukraine but also abroad, and student migration continues to grow significantly.

As regards to last year, the peak of student migration occurred in March 2022 (Horna & Pron, 2022). This is not surprising, because between 24 February and 4 May 2022, 1522 educational institutions were damaged in Ukraine, including 35 universities (34 damaged and one destroyed) (Horna & Pron, 2022). In terms of quantitative indicators, educational institutions in the Donetsk, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv and Kyiv regions were most affected (Horna & Pron, 2022).

Thus, the war exacerbated the problem that had existed before for small universities and certain specialized programs as the problem of 'small academic groups' (2-10 students each). This problem became more acute last year. Here is some statistics. According to the Unified State Electronic Database on Education of Ukraine, a total of 902 applications were submitted for the specialty of chemistry at all universities of Ukraine. However, given that applicants were eligible to apply for at least 5 specialties, only 322 applicants were recommended for admission with a total number of 1278 places. The situation is similar for other unpopular specialties. This poses a threat to the growth of small academic groups at universities. Small academic group are a big problem for universities, because the small groups of students increase the state and university spending on student education. Since universities do not risk raising tuition prices significantly, they save money on teachers who are not paid in full for teaching small group classes. As a result, the motivation of teachers decreases and the quality of education decreases. The small size of the groups also limits the students' free choice of subjects to learn (Ligidov et al., 2021).

The war imposed on Ukraine by the russian dictatorial regime has forced a fresh look at many aspects, including the organization of educational space, particularly through the prism of opportunities to avoid small groups. In particular, serious management decisions need to be taken by university leaders to reduce the number of understaffed groups. According to researchers and experts, "reasonable unification", both in the name of disciplines and in the ratio of types of classes, will allow in many cases, especially in the study of general education disciplines, to combine small groups into large ones. This will help to ensure that the normal organization of the curriculum (Ligidov et al., 2021). Another possible is collaboration between universities in creating mutual or interuniversity courses. Students would then be able to choose not only from cour ses offered by their own university, but also from a number of inter-university courses. In this case, students get the opportunity to take a high-quality course that cannot be taught at their university. The latter approach is fundamentally new for Ukrainian students; therefore, it also involves a number of problems on the way to its implementation, such as: bureaucracy, recognition courses, salary of teachers, normalization of examination approach etc. There may also be a problem with motivation discipline that can result in low passing rate. In this work we present a case study of an interuniversity course "Integrated course in life sciences" which was given to Ukrainian students of biologic specialty from different universities of Ukraine. The core of course was the team of teachers of Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian university, but also teachers from other Ukrainian Universities and German institutions are employed. The purpose of this case study was to analyze student motivation, attendance statistics, exam results, and learning outcomes of the course to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the inter-university course to enable our experience to be replicated at other universities for wider implementation.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE, METHODOLOGY AND DATA

Organization of interuniversity online course and selection procedure

In the study, we analyze the interest and effectiveness the interuniversity online course "Integrated course in life sciences" for biologists, which was held during September -December, 2023. The course includes biochemistry, physiology, molecular biology, biophysics and instrumental methods in biology and was organized as part of the program "Ukraine digital:

Ensuring academic success in times of crisis (2022)" [http://surl.li/gcivv] supported by German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD; German: Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst). The project was led by Tubingen University; however, the study program was designed by Ukrainian partner (Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University). The course was designed for bachelor's students of biological specialties, primarily from the frontline areas and partner universities. The partner universities in the project were Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University, Ivan Franko Lviv National University, Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, Kherson State University, Odessa I.I. Mechnikov National University, and V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. Since not only undergraduate students were interested in the course, two groups of students were formed: the main group of 90 undergraduate students who were allowed to apply for scholarships, and an additional group of so-called free listeners, who were allowed to visit lectures but not seminars and not eligible for applying for scholarships. The selection of students for the course was done by following criteria: (i) student's study program corresponds to the course scope (>95% of all students were studying biology, biochemistry, biophysics or biotechnology; (ii) social factors (priority was given to students from areas strongly affected by the war, ~65%); (iii) previous agreement of university to accept course certificate ('partner universities'), 81 out of 90 students. Most of the students were 2nd, 3d, or 4th year of study (37%, 34%, 27%, respectively)

The scholarships were awarded at the beginning of the course based on social factors (mainly to students who had to left their cities because of the war and to students living in the frontline territories of Ukraine) and did not take into account the final exam results or knowledge level of the students. Therefore, we can expect some bias in the performance of students with scholarships as their living and study conditions were in average less comfortable.

The integrated course included 52 lectures and 23 seminars (in total 150 h) and for practical works (seminars) students were divided into 3 groups based on the year of study.

Registration and exam statistics

The complete depersonalized dataset (330 entries) of the applications for the course, registration and provided scholarships was obtained from the course organizers. It contained student specialization, university, and year of study. Separately we obtained depersonalized dataset of final exam marks for each of 5 course disciplines with additional information of whether the student was provided with a scholarship.

Survey methodology

An anonymous survey was conducted among the students who attended the final course exam (68 answers). It was designed by the course organizers to evaluate the interest in the course and its relevance in war time. The student survey included questions about their motivation for participating in the course, their satisfaction with the course as a whole and its individual parts (disciplines), and the problems students faced most when attending the course. It also analyzed which course disciplines students found most difficult and most useful.