Keep on learning! – Teaching approaches and student personality types in digital times

The summer term of 2020 gave a grave boost to digitalisation and paved the way to hybrid and online courses. Teaching in an offline classroom setting has ceased almost overnight. The changeover to online formats often took place with little lead time and insufficient infrastructure. By the winter term of 2020/21, lecturers have shown a steep learning curve: Taking advantage of their initial experience, they have conceived quite diverse didactic teaching concepts. At Kiel University, almost all political science courses were held as video conferences in this winter term and other digital tools were integrated. Time for an evaluation of this major shift in teaching political science. As online teaching changes the way of interaction, we are interested in the students' evaluation of the implemented digital tools like breakout sessions and digital notice boards for seminars as well as audio slides and short learning videos for lectures. Moreover, the impact of different personality types on learning success shall be investigated. With reduced guidance and limited social interaction, we believe that the personality traits self-efficacy, self-control, and extraversion moderate the learning experience and impact perceived exhaustion. A total of 1,617 students are currently enrolled in a degree programme with a political science component at Kiel University. In February 2021 all these students were contacted to participate in an online survey (response rate 22.1 per cent). The results of this survey will be presented at the ECPR.