G.2 Timing of formative feedback in a virtual learning environment from an E-tutors perspective

One of the most important learning activities of a student at the university are collaborative activities which have a positive effect on the learning skills of students. In the last decades and especially in the last years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a huge increase in offers to learn in virtual environments. This increase led to the need for professional pedagogical support within the unique environment, which can be addressed by E-tutors. This learning facilitation role becomes increasingly important. Nevertheless, the number of concrete recommendations when interventions are needed is rare. The aim of this study is to fill the gap in the literature when the E-tutor needs to give feedback to students in higher education. The results are derived from a systematic literature review and a qualitative content analysis. The findings indicate that feedback needs to be given in a close timeframe, at best within the first two hours after a question arises. © Communities in New Media. Digitality and Diversity Overcoming Barriers with Digital Transformation - Proceedings of 25th Conference GeNeMe 2022.

Virtual collaborative learning during COVID19 - Lessons learned in practice

Teaching and learning have changed significantly due to the impact of the COVID19 pandemic, even for modules that were already delivered primarily digitally before the pandemic. Students have minimal social interaction in the context of higher education and face additional challenges outside of the university. This leads to a lack of engagement and also higher drop-out rates. Above all, the lower level of communication with instructors and the course offerings created during the rush into e-learning in early 2020 are intensively discussed as reasons. These effects were also felt in the hybrid modules based on the Virtual Collaborative Learning (VCL) framework. The following field report takes up the lessons learned just before and during the COVID19 pandemic and reflects on them within the scope of the four design dimensions of VCL: professional pedagogical support, technical platform, authentic task design, and learning analytics support. Particularly during the summer semester of 2020, we could observe a certain decrease in student engagement. Thus, adjustments were made to each design dimension during the pandemic that, in combination, showed an improvement in student engagement. In particular, good timing in communication and constant accessibility of supervisors are perceived as helpful. But also optimal conditions of the technical platform concerning tools, usability, and usefulness as well as the anchoring of social interactions in the instructional design were seen as conducive to engagement. Finally, Learning Analytics offers another perspective that leads to social interaction. Nevertheless, rapid iterative adaptation is associated with high effort for teachers, which needs to be reduced through the ongoing improvement of the four design dimensions. © 2021 IDIMT 2021 - Pandemics: Impacts, Strategies and Responses, 29th Interdisciplinary Information Management Talks All rights reserved.