Home-schooling during the pandemic: A push for digital education in German classrooms?!

From Firenze University Press Journal: Media Education

Nadine Elstrodt-Wefing, Technische Universität Dortmund

Ute Ritterfeld, Technische Universität Dortmund

The COVID-19 home-schooling situation has become a catalyst for educational institutions to search for and deploy innovative solutions within a relatively short period of time.

Since many teachers have been forced to employ technical or digital approaches with which they have had little to no prior experience, this situation might give rise to a push for digital education. In the present study we employed a two-part interview-survey to investigate how home-schooling affects German teachers’ general technical affinity and their digital teaching competence during home-schooling.

Furthermore, the qualitative properties of the implementation of home-schooling were explored. The results of the study revealed that the teachers’ digital teaching competence, but not their technical affinity, changed during the pandemic.

An increase in digital teaching competence was only identifiable for the first weeks of the pandemic. Qualitative analyses showed that the teachers used three different types of educational tools: (1) digital tools, (2) analogue tools, and (3) technical tools. Over the course of the pandemic the usage of those tools became more structured.

However, structures were mostly built on a micro-level, e.g., by individual teachers for their classes; no macro-structures like class-comprehensive rules or even strategy papers for digital teaching were developed.

With centuries-old, lecture-based approaches to teaching and entrenched institutional biases, the slow pace of change in Germany’s academic institutions — especially with regard to the application of new technologies — is lamentable. However, risk-control measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in total closures of schools with millions of students and their teachers being confronted with temporary ‘home-schooling’.

As home-schooling involves the usage of technology, the COVID-19 situation has become a catalyst for educational institutions to search for and deploy innovative solutions within a relatively short period of time. Since many teachers have been forced to employ technical or digital solutions with which they have had little to no prior experience, this situation can also be viewed as a huge field experiment for the study of behavioural change. In the present study we attempt to capture parts of the changes prompted by these circumstances.

We employed a two-part interview-survey to investigate how home-schooling affects teachers’ general technical affinity and their digital teaching competence over a period of twelve weeks. Furthermore, the qualitative properties of the implementation of home-schooling are explored.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/me-9686

Read Full Text: https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/med/article/view/9686