Online Exercise Sessions: challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Exercise session is an important part of a course in higher education to build a student's problem-solving skills. Due to the Corona Pandemic, this session is also forced to move into an online setting. As Online teaching has proved to be more accessible, people might tend to move towards Online or hybrid teaching practices. It is important to know what the challenges are and opportunities we face in Online Exercise Sessions and, if possible, discuss some solutions on how to improve teaching quality. In this report we will discuss our experience with two types of online exercise sessions at LTH: Computer based and Problem-Solving based. Based on our experience as Teaching Assistants, we found that the quality of Problem-Solving based exercise sessions have degraded. We conducted a survey to validate our concerns about those problem-solving based exercise sessions from the students' point of view and to identify any possible solutions to improve the situation. The survey was performed on a group of students in LTH who have experienced both offline and online problem-solving based exercise sessions. The results show that the quality of online problem-based exercise sessions is degraded, which affects the motivation of the students to attend these sessions.