The usefulness and future of distance education from the perspective of students and lecturers

To make distance education as effective as possible after the pandemic we conducted a survey to investigate the usefulness of online teaching formats (synchronous vs. asynchronous) and the preferred amount of distance vs. in-person education from the perspective of students and lecturers. The results show that students and lecturers perceive synchronous learning units to be more helpful overall. The preferred amount of distance education (34-50%) was higher for the students than for the lecturers. Regarding prior experience with distance education, there were partially significant differences among the students in terms of how helpful they perceived individual teaching formats to be.