Covid-19 teaching and learning: The students' perspective

At the SIG meeting 16 September 2020, Laura T. Finne presented her initial findings from interviews with pharmacy students at UCPH shortly after the Covid-19 lockdown. The students were sent home from the university, and all teaching activities were rescheduled to online activities. However, how do you turn a physical lab into an online version from one day to the next, and how does it affect the students?

In the Pharmaceutical Analytical Chemistry course, students were provided with data that they otherwise would have obtained in the lab. Based on the data, the students had to write a report. Students’ initial experience 2-3 weeks after the lockdown was that they lacked motivation and structure that they usually obtained from being in a study environment. The group work around the report writing became more individual for some students and more collaborative for others.

Most noticeable is the students’ lack of informal discussion and contact with the teachers, which is usually a distinct element in lab sessions. Furthermore, most of the students expressed a difficulty in understanding the data and the purpose of the experiments in the absence of the actual work in the laboratory. They somehow missed the “essence” of the exercises. This is a very interesting finding, and Laura T. Finne is looking forward to exploring this in further detail.