Large interactive touchscreens as an opportunity for synchronous hybrid teaching during COVID-19 pandemic and beyond

The year 2020 will be remembered as the year of COVID-19 and its subsequent lockdowns. The time to return to face-to-face teaching has arrived, but the shadow of the disease still hangs over teachers, students and society. Disruption in teaching can still occur for students, or even teachers, if they are either diagnosed as COVID-19 positive or as a contact case and forced to self-isolate. In order to limit the impact of self-isolation on learning, synchronous hybrid teaching (i.e. teaching face-to-face to students in a classroom and to students online at the same time) was successfully implemented owing to the combination of a videoconference software and a large interactive touchscreen. The setup presented in this paper allows courses to be broadcasted to students at-home (i.e. voice, visual pedagogic support and, more interestingly, indications handwritten by the teacher) as well as simultaneously teaching to students in the classroom face-to-face. It also allows self-isolated teachers to teach tutorials from their home to students in the classroom. This paper focuses on the use of large interactive touchscreens for synchronous hybrid teaching and its evaluation by students using a questionnaire. The key findings of this study are that students prefer synchronous hybrid teaching rather than missing a course and that synchronous hybrid teaching should only be used in case of absolute necessity.