In the fourth week of the spring semester 2020, Swiss public life was subjected to an eight-week lockdown. The abrupt switch to distance learning in higher education as it was experienced across the globe due to the sanitary crisis revealed strengths and weaknesses in the educational offer and how students dealt with it. This project investigates the distance learning experiences of the diverse student body in three teacher education institutions in Switzerland. What learnings can be drawn for the further development of learning environments that support student engagement with their learning processes?

Student engagement as a multi-faceted meta-construct is seen as a predictor for student success (Kuh, Cruce, Shoup, Kinzie, & Gonyea, 2008). With a reference to Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris (2004), Bond, Bedenlier, Buntins, Kerres, and Zawacki-Richter (2020, p. 4) define student engagement as “the energy and effort that students employ within their learning community, observable via any number of behavioral, cognitive or affective indicators across a continuum”. The concept is promising in this context because it focuses on the behaviour of students rather than their individual characteristics (Kahu & Nelson, 2018; Krause & Coates, 2008; Kuh, 2009). The concept also suggests a shared responsibility between the students and the institution for learning: “individual student engagement occurs dynamically within an educational interface at the intersection of the student and their characteristics and background, and the institution and its practices” (Kahu & Nelson, 2018, p. 59).

Research on student engagement places the attention on the complex processes involved in the interaction between the learning opportunities offered by the university and their use by the students. Kahu and Nelson (2018) highlight self-efficacy, learning-related emotions, well-being and sense of belonging as moderating variables in the educational interface to explain student engagement.

In this project, interest is focused on the distance learning experiences of the diverse student body in Swiss teacher education. Since 1990, student diversity in terms of educational and socio-economic background as well as living circumstances has increased in all study programs at Swiss universities (Kiener, 2012), resulting in the emergence of part time programs to respond to heterogenous student needs. Given the flexible access to higher education, Universities of Teacher Education (UTE) also have extensive experience with career changers (Bauer, Bieri Buschor, & Bürgler, 2019).

With the simultaneous switch to distance learning in school and universities alike, many students have been experiencing critical situations not only as students also in their role as caregivers, parents or teachers. Faculty’s main challenges included creating a social context to facilitate learning and skills-oriented training at a distance as well as supporting competence development in internships (Ferdig, Baumgartner, Hartshorne, Kaplan-Rakowski, & Mouza, 2020).

The following research question is the focus of this project:

How do students perceive the Distance Learning offering in terms of their own engagement and what are their experiences in using it? What do they consider beneficial or detrimental to their behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement?

Qualitative and quantitative data were collected in three universities of teacher education in the period of April to June 2020 using a mixed method approach. A survey at the end of the spring semester included the entire student population in full-time and part-time programmes of three UTEs. Data analysis encompassed group comparisons and regression analysis. In this presentation however, we will report predominantly of the analysis of semi-structured interviews we conducted in all three institutions with three students each at three points in time during the spring semester 2020. Qualitative content analysis was the main methodological approach in the analysis process (Kuckartz, 2018). The analysis followed a mix of deductive and inductive procedures. Starting from existing codebooks regarding teaching quality in higher education (Hawelka & Hiltmann, 2018) and adaptations to the specific context the material was coded deductively. In subsequent steps procedures of open coding were applied to gain a deep understanding of the categories and relations between them.

Quantitative analysis of the survey indicated that students generally were satisfied with their behavioural and cognitive engagement in distance learning. There are hardly any significant differences between the study programs or between the two institutions. Within the study programs, however, there is a considerable vari-ance between students in terms of their experienced level of stress, learning-related emotions and satisfac-tion with their engagement. Contrary to expectations, structural aspects (e.g., age, employment, children) play a subordinate role in explaining this variance. Also, considerable differences in the implementation of distance learning between the two institutions (e.g., synchronous vs. asynchronous) lead to comparable results in student perception regarding the activating character of the learning environment or the quality and clarity of feedback and assessment. These results call for a more attention to the complex interplay in the educational interface and the way distance learning settings influence learning related emotions, wellbeing, belonging and thus student engagement. Results of the qualitative analysis emphasize the importance of student-faculty interaction at a distance to support emotional engagement. Peer interaction is less discussed but nevertheless a critical resource to foster not only emotional but also cognitive engagement. Course design varied substantially across institutions but also between individual courses. Contrasting more synchronous vs. asynchronous approaches falls short to understand the complex dynamics. In course design, students point to the critical balance between the desire for structure and clarity on one side and autonomy to provide room for individual student needs. For students, a change in assessment practice has been a dominant issue as teachers had to adapt the format and content to the new situation. The dominant influence that exams have on student engagement in all its facets is visible and of outmost importance.

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