Polarizing effect: Challenges of an accelerated digitalization caused by Sars-Cov-2

ABSTRACT

The worldwide pandemic changes our ways of teaching enormously. Before the virus Sars-Cov-2 came along, the vast majority of teaching in Germany was face-to-face with on-site attendance. From one day to another, a lockdown happened globally, and the teaching method shifted to an entire online semester. We looked at two more remarkable higher education institutions ALPHA, a top-ranked university, and BETA, a leading private university, both situated in Germany. We applied the didactic framework of Go4C [43] in the first stage of preparation. In this stage, we qualitatively coded answers to an explorative questionnaire. Caused by the method shift, we expected to recognize first insights of the learners' positive and negative effects. Surprisingly, the study found a polarization effect in learners' perceptions of the shift to online instruction. It adds four specific aspect groups to the knowledge base that illustrate this effect. Researchers can apply these findings to explore methods to confirm these explorative results and thesis and reduce the polarization effect. Teachers can react to the top aspects such as knowledge transfer to provide more adapted learning. © 2021 IEEE.