How the Pandemic Helped and Hindered Student-Centered Learning

The student-centered learning approach “learning office” has been established in vocational school education under constant evaluation through a team of education researchers. In the past two years, emergency online teaching has affected education world-wide with a severe impact on teacher-centered as well as student-centered education.

Our goal is to evaluate teachers’ and students’ perspectives on emergency and systematic online teaching and to get an impression of students’ perceived competence in 21st century skills which the learning office is specifically designed to foster. For this, we reconcile the change in perspectives through comparisons of open text answers from a questionnaire after experiencing emergency online teaching and interviews with students and teachers regarding their perceived change in the way contents are taught.

We find diverse aspects which are partially favourable for student-centered learning in times of self-reliant education at home. However, we also identified adversary effects of studying alone at home for the learning office due to its interactive nature. On the one hand, students felt more self-reliant and able to work on materials on their own accord without constant input or supervision of a teacher. On the other hand, students missed the personal interaction with their peers, but even more with their teachers in the online setting.

Based on our questionnaire and interviews, we find that student-centered learning indeed helped to develop the skills for self-reliant learning in students. However, the position of the educator as a coach and guiding figure to the students is irreplaceable, especially in student-centered learning.