ABSTRACT
Education during the COVID-19 pandemic has experienced a massive shift towards online modes of instruction in higher education. This paper presents an example of such adaptation during the spring 2020 lockdown in the context of an ESP course taught to psychology students at a Spanish university. Specifically, we adopted the Cybertask model (Girón-García C.Learning styles and reading modes in the development of language learning autonomy through ‘Cybertasks'. Barcelona. ed. Universitat Jaume I. Retrieved November 7, 2020, from http://hdl.handle.net/10803/125440, 2013;Girón-García & C, Boghiu-Balaur S. Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas 16:95–122. https://doi.org/10.4995/rlyla.2021.13950, 2021) to design an online task about psychotherapy that could be integrated into the Moodle platform in the form of a Lesson to explore the effectiveness of this asynchronous ‘Cybertask-based Lesson' as compared to an equivalent synchronous online task guided by the teacher during a live online session. The study examines the outcomes of each type of task by assessing the students' achievement in learning new specialized content as well as their impressions regarding perceived interest and usefulness. 144 students were assigned to one of three different groups. The Experimental group 1 (N = 40) performed the Lesson/asynchronous task, the Experimental group 2 (N = 38) did the teacher-guided/synchronous task while the Control group (N = 36) did a regular online class addressing a different topic. The results indicate that, regarding achievement, both pedagogical alternatives are effective to a similar extent. However, task perception scores were significantly higher in the Experimental group 1. Further research is needed to explore the potential benefits of similar asynchronous tasks in the current higher education panorama, where there is a progressively greater demand for online learning. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.