The main research team and our respondents

From Excited, professor and merited educator Rune Hjelsvold who is head of the research project "Sharing and diversity" is leading this research. He is working with PhD Abdullah Bahmani, and to do research on the students’ experiences is Madeleine Lorås, a PhD on the Excited project "projects of becoming" where she is studying study habits for the first- and second-year IT students at NTNU.

We have teamed up with NTNU Beta, a support structure to allow more NTNU Teachers to explore and develop digital tools for their teacing. From them, Andreas Krokan and Shaun S Nykvist has been part of this study. 

The results presented here are based on an initial survey sent to students and educators during the first few days of them needing to move from a face-to-face or blended mode of teaching and learning to an online only mode of teaching and learning. The data includes responses from 303 students with over 50% of the responses coming from Computer Science and Engineering and the remaining responses coming from a mix of faculties and departments. There were also 56 educators from a large range of departments that responded to the survey.

Recommendations and takeaways to support both educators and students

The goals of our study are to be able to provide recommendations and takeaways to support both educators and students in this transition to an online mode of learning. These recommendations are based on a survey response that may not be representative of all students and educators at NTNU, but the intention of this survey is to enable timely feedback to staff at NTNU, to better support student success, as the university moves to an online only mode of study and needs to start to plan for doing so for the big courses also this fall semester.

We wanted to gather experiences and thoughts about life on the internet from both students and staff at NTNU. We have also included administrative staff, as they to have a lot of changes and need to execute them from a home office. By the middle of April we have a preliminery report for both staff and students a Student report - Online teaching and learning, and an Educator experiences report - Online teaching and learning 

The next steps in this ongoing research

We are now using the results of the study to advise both groups and the study leaders on how to adjust the course to improve the quality of the fully digital study situation.

The next step in our research is to have a more in-depth comparative study of the results of the two different respondent groups, staff and students, and from that give even better recommendations to those groups plus the study leaders .

As a center, Excited also has a project aimed at the upper secondary level in schools in Norway. We are now conducting a similar study as the one at NTNU for the students. Here, the team consist of Professor Monica Divitini, PhD student Vojislav Vujošević and Majid Rouhani. 

Excited is also planning a study to investigate how PhD studies are affected by this situation.