A Large-Scale Mixed-Methods Analysis of Live Streaming Based Remote Education Experience in Chinese Colleges During the COVID-19 Pandemic
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The COVID-19 global pandemic and resulted lockdown policies have forced formal education in nearly every country to switch from a traditional colocated paradigm to a pure online "distance learning from home" paradigm. Lying in the center of this learning paradigm shift is the emergence and wide adoption of distance communication tools and live streaming in education. How have such live-streaming based education mode support student learning from home experience during the pandemic? Here, we present the first-ever study on live streaming based education (LS learning) experience during the COVID-19 pandemic through mixed methods. We focus our analysis on Chinese higher education, carried out semi-structured interviews on 30 students, and 7 instructors from diverse colleges and disciplines, meanwhile launched a large-scale survey covering 6291 students and 1160 instructors in one leading Chinese university. Our findings suggest live-streaming based education do help students and teachers achieve their education goal to a great extent, yet there are several key challenges unresolved by current modes. We further demonstrate the emergence of several novel learning experiences and modes of interactions, which contribute to variations in instructor-student, and student-student relationships. Our work not only reveals important design guidelines and insights to better support current remote learning experience during the pandemic, but also provides valuable implications towards constructing future collaborative education supporting systems and experience post pandemic.
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