Learning Strategies Among Students During a Sudden Transition to Online Teaching in a PBL University

Increasing use of digital tools in university teaching has attracted scholarly attention on the interaction between pedagogic design and digital technologies. The accelerated transition to online learning following the crisis of COVID-19 has raised a number of questions regarding the tie between technological affordances and learning strategies, especially with regard to the role of dialogue in learning. Based on a questionnaire with 51 postgraduate students in a PBL-university, where collaborative interaction and dialogic processes are regarded as integral to the PBL-method, this study investigates how students navigated the altered learning environment. We found that students’ experiences with online teaching denote reduced affordances for learning. They experienced decreased co-involvement in decision-making, decreased dialogic collaboration and a changed pedagogic setup that did not support learning through discursive meaning negotiations. Thus, whilst dialogues can be transformed by digital technology, these changes are not necessarily productive when taking into account the ideal of democratic discourse. Arguably, the digital transformation will continue to evolve and to influence the quality of university teaching. The paper concludes by discussing the potential of democratic dialogic teaching to stimulate learning ecologies in online and hybrid learning environments.