ABSTRACT
The global new crown pneumonia epidemic (COVID-19) is raging all over the world, causing a great impact on people's livelihood, economy and education. Taiwan has implemented a level 3 alert in mid-2021, and schools and educational institutions have to stop physical teaching and replace it with online digital teaching, which challenges many educators who are used to traditional physical teaching. Therefore, this study mainly discusses the difficulties and solutions encountered in the implementation of online digital teaching, taking a primary school in Pingtung County as a case study. This study adopted interviews method, supplemented by document analysis. The research sample was in-service teachers of various grades of the primary school. The following results were obtained after the interviews: (1) The school stipulates that teachers use specific software for online teaching. (2) The difficulties in online teaching are mainly due to software and hardware equipment and individual factors of students. (3) Most teachers believe that online teaching affects learning motivation and learning performance. (4) Students are prone to health and interpersonal problems during online teaching. This study proposes recommendations for schools to implement online teaching as a reference.
ABSTRACT
Online courses are prevalent around the world, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Long hours of highly demanding online learning can lead to mental fatigue and cognitive depletion. According to Attention Restoration Theory, 'being away' or a mental shift could be an important strategy to allow a person to recover from the cognitive overload. The present study aimed to test the interleaving strategy as a mental shift method to help sustain students' online learning attention and to improve learning outcomes. A total of 81 seventh-grade Chinese students were randomly assigned to four learning conditions: blocked (by subject matter) micro-lectures with auditory textual information (B-A condition), blocked (by subject matter) micro-lectures with visual textual information (B-V condition), interleaved (by subject matter) micro-lectures with auditory textual information (I-A condition), and interleaved micro-lectures by both perceptual modality and subject matter (I-all condition). We collected self-reported data on subjective cognitive load (SCL) and attention level, EEG data during the 40 min of online learning, and test results to assess learning outcomes. The results showed that the I-all condition showed the best overall outcomes (best performance, low SCL, and high attention). This study suggests that interleaving by both subject matter and perceptual modality should be preferred in scheduling and planning online classes.