A Distinctive Method of Online Interactive Learning in STEM Education

COVID-19 online teaching intervention and learning performance of college foreign language students

This quasi-natural experimental study examined an online teaching intervention implemented in response to COVID-19 in China in 2020. It applied the difference-in-difference model to examine the impact and path of the intervention on students' learning performance of a college foreign language (LPCFL). Based on data from records of withdrawing and changing courses, classroom learning, and teaching evaluations; a questionnaire survey of teachers and students; and relevant school documents during the last seven terms, the results indicated that the online teaching intervention could significantly improve students' LPCFL. This finding remained robust after adopting a placebo test approach to mitigate possible endogeneity issues. Additionally, this study also conducted a group test through sub-sample regression based on students' discipline characteristics and intervention organization methods. The results showed that the students who participated in the intervention significantly improved in the three disciplines: humanities was most significantly affected, science and engineering were least significantly affected, and economics and management were in the middle. A range effect was observed for organizational methods. The two downward transmission methods by college teaching management terms had significant positive effects, whereas the other two methods of downward transmission by college student management had significant negative effects. An analysis of the action mechanism indicated that the online teaching intervention mostly improved LPCFL through two channels: students' learning input and learning support. Overall, these findings not only help expand the research framework on macro environmental intervention policy and micro-learning behavior but also have implications for the in-depth understanding of the real learning effect of online learning interventions for college students and their design in the post-COVID-19 era.

Using Digital Tools to Teach Soft Skill-Oriented Subjects to University Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Radical changes in education occurred in 2020 during the pandemic. The need to fully switch to a distance-learning mode required rethinking the approaches to the organization of the learning process. Despite the fact that Russian universities were already using digital learning tools quite extensively at the beginning of the pandemic—those were seen as auxiliary, supporting tools. Within a short period, online learning made it necessary to design educational programs from a digital-technologies viewpoint, as traditional teaching methods had lost some of their functionality in the distance-learning mode. First of all, the changes affected the disciplines focused on the formation of soft skills, such as communication skills, group interaction, and managing people. Another problem of digitalization of all aspects of our lives is the huge amount of readily available information. In this regard, developing the students’ systemic thinking and augmenting their ability to find and properly use information became an important alternative to acquisition of factual knowledge. This article summarizes the experience of the educational process at one of the leading Russian universities, National University of Science and Technology (NUST) “MISIS” during the COVID-19 pandemic based on the analysis of the degree of application of digital tools in online and hybrid learning. In this article, we present the description of methodology approaches to the use of digital tools for soft skill development, using the example of teaching specific disciplines “Systems Thinking and Theory of Constraints” and “Life Cycle of Corporations and Change Management” in the master’s program in Corporate Finance taught at NUST “MISIS”.