Conference Agenda

COVID-19 pandemic had a major adverse impact on the lives of people and societies over the past two years, particularly in the educational sector. Public health measures to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education in over 150 countries and affected 1.6 billion students [1]. The lockdowns imposed on several countries forced many children and young people to migrate from face-to-face education to distance learning. Strictly speaking, this was not distance learning, i.e., “well-planned online learning experience”, but rather emergency remote learning, “courses offered online in response to a crisis” [2].

The pandemic situation inspired many studies and reports on education in times of lockdown. Much literature focused policy responses devised in this period [3, 4], highlighting the idea that educational inequalities have increased considerably with the disruption caused by the various lockdowns [5, 6]. Some authors have looked at pedagogical issues and teaching practices associated with distance learning [3], focusing on teachers’ perspectives [8], mainly at the school level.

Comparatively fewer studies have looked at the perspective of young students and analysed how they have adapted to distance learning. The reason for this gap may be the assumption that young people would not have difficulties migrating to this type of education because they are considered “digital natives” [9].

In fact, the literature indicates that young people are intensive users of digital technologies [10], and digital practices underpin the intense mediated experience prevalent in the everyday lives of these so-called “digital natives”. Navigating in this ubiquitous environment changes the way students think and process information [9].

In contrast, conventional face-to-face teaching in secondary and tertiary education is largely structured in sequential times and contents, delivered step-by-step, and undertaken in rigid spaces.

The shift to online learning imposed by the lockdowns represented an opportunity to change this paradigm, bringing teaching closer to the online environment familiar to young people. One might expect students to prefer this move to online learning. However, research conducted these past two years on online learning during lockdown converges on a common trait: students generally do not like the virtual learning experience they have been forced to enter [3, 11, 12]. There seems to be a paradox here: young digital natives, avid users of technology (although mostly for leisure purposes) claim to prefer face-to-face teaching to distance learning. It matters then to examine the reasons behind this preference, beyond the issues of emergency limitations to teaching in disaster contexts

Based on the results of one online survey applied in the second lockdown period in Portugal (February 2021), this contribution seeks to determine what young respondents (16–24 years old) think about their experiences of attending classes from home. More specifically, the proposal aims to delve into young students’ perceptions and experience with remote education; and to investigate expectations of academic life postponed or frustrated during this period.

Virtual collaboration is becoming increasingly more common in work life and education, a development that has been accentuated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Working together via online platforms enables collaboration across the globe, which is considered key for realizing the UN’s sustainable development goals, as people from all over the world and from different professions and disciplines can be brought together to solve global problems. The same holds true for education, where online platforms allow student collaboration across institutions and geographical borders and thus for exposing students to viewpoints and the diversity of people from different places (Usher & Barak, 2020). It is thus imperative that students learn to work in and as teams in online settings. One pedagogy to facilitate such learning is project-based learning, a form of student-centric, collaborative learning whereby students work on projects with real-world problems (Guo et al., 2020; Krajcik & Blumenfeld, 2006).

However, virtual collaboration brings challenges, particularly those related to the social dimensions of teamwork. Social interaction is more difficult when communication happens digitally (Janssen & Kirschner, 2020). Without the non-verbal communication that occur in face-to-face interactions, digital interactions are often more formal (Pérez-Mateo & Guitert, 2012). A team is inherently a social entity and the interaction between team members is critical to develop and sustain beneficial team emergent states (Akan et al., 2020). Social interaction in a team is furthermore essential for learning and general wellbeing (Sjølie et al., 2022). Scholars in education have therefore focused on how social interaction can be enabled and stimulated in online environments.

Despite abundant research on online student collaboration, researchers have only to a limited extent explored learning settings where student teams self-organize their collaboration (Sjølie et al., 2022). Research has primarily focused on how online learning environments can be designed to improve learning or on how teachers and technology can facilitate social interaction. What has been missing is a focus on students as agents rather than passive learners who are molded by teachers or technology. To understand how student teamwork and learning are enabled and constrained within virtual environments we need to explore how student collaboration play out in online settings when students (primarily) organize and lead themselves, in interaction with a variety of online platforms and tools.

This paper provides insight into the social aspects of student teamwork in a digital or hybrid environment. With a qualitative design, the study explores how students experienced the social climate in their virtual and hybrid teams in an interdisciplinary project-based course during the COVID-19 pandemic and whether and how they took actively part in creating and sustaining the social climate in their teams.

We use the term social climate for the key characteristics of the socio-emotional dimension of interaction within a team. The socio-emotional dimension is typically fostered in non-task contexts and is characterized as more casual than task-related interaction (Kreijns et al., 2013). Some researchers understand the socio-emotional dimension as the interaction that is perceived to go beyond what is strictly necessary to achieve an academic goal (Pérez-Mateo & Guitert, 2012). Using these existing accounts from the literature, the social climate is fostered both in task and non-task contexts, and it describes the students’ perceptions of being part of a team. We will also draw on Sias’ (2009) three types of peer relationships – information peer relationships, collegial peer relationships and special peer relationships. Sias argues that the quality of peer relationships affects satisfaction, commitment, and stress on the individual level. While Sias (2009) is concerned with peer relationships within an organization, it is reasonable to assume that there are similarities between peer relationships and team member relationships.

A recurrent theme in research on learning in higher education revolves around the role of learning strategies in studying, adapting to new challenges and continuing to learn (Biwer et al., 2020; Huet et al., 2008). Within this framework, there is a certain consensus that university students need to develop: i) the ability to gather and interpret relevant data (usually within their field of study) to inform judgments that include reflection on relevant social, scientific or ethical issues; ii) communicate information, ideas, problems and solutions to both specialist and non-specialist audiences (postgraduate level) and communicate their conclusions, the knowledge and rationale, to specialist and non-specialist audiences clearly and unambiguously (postgraduate level); and iii) have developed those learning skills that are necessary for them to continue to undertake further study with a higher degree of autonomy (Huet et al., 2008, p. 158)

A review of the research literature on learning strategies at the University shows that the predominant foci are on (a) the relationship between the strategies adopted by pupils in secondary education and their adequacy (or not) to the needs of higher education (Bjork, Dunlosky, & Kornell, 2013 ), (b) the strategies that students need to learn and use to succeed in higher education, (c) the strategies that either universities or teachers promote in their classes; and (d) on methods to improve metacognitive knowledge and to encourage effective learning strategies in higher education (Tullis, Finley, & Benjamin, 2013; Yan, Bjork,& Bjork, 2016). The characteristic feature of these approaches is that they aim to, after defining the authors' conceptualisation of what learning strategies are and should do, 'measure' effectiveness, usually by linking it to student performance. This approach's characteristic is that it seems to view students as an 'empty box' who, in their years of schooling and social and cultural life, have not learned and integrated learning strategies that they can transfer and use at the University.

[Anonymised] research project, instead of considering students as 'lacking', sees them as epistemic selves, prepared for rational knowledge (Charlot, 2001), as 'carriers' of knowledge and learning strategies that have been incorporated into their conceptual and practical baggage, not only in schooling experiences but also in everyday life situations and contexts (sports, socialisation, family,...). This paper focuses on making a 'reading' of what the [anonymised] conversations with the students provide. It allows us to think about the learning strategies that young people share with us and how they relate to those 'demanded by the university'. We aim to generate ways of understanding the following questions: What strategies do students use to learn? What do these strategies allow us to consider the strategies proposed by researchers and teachers as necessary for the University? How do students' strategies relate to the different degrees they study? To what extent did virtual learning during covid lead to the emergence of other learning strategies?