An empirical study on students’ academic wellbeing and sustainable development in live webcast classes

Abstract

In recent years, live webcast classes have been increasingly used in China as an approach to alleviating educational poverty through equal access to high-quality education. Many schools in impoverished areas have managed to increase their proportions of students entering college by introducing the new model. While celebrating improved learning outcomes of a small percentage of students, educators should also be concerned about the overall academic wellbeing and sustainable development of less successful students. In the present study, academic wellbeing was conceptualized as a multidimensional construct covering seven dimensions, namely Empathy, Support, Responsive-ness, Reliability, Tangibility, Self-efficacy and Buoyancy. Data were collected from 136 twelfth-grade students who had studied in live webcast classes. The results show that the overall academic wellbeing in live webcast classes was consistent among students of different academic performance levels, but the specific dimensions of academic wellbeing that they think mostly need improvement varied among different student groups. The findings of this study suggest that learner wellbeing and sustainability can be enhanced by closer collaboration between live webcast instructors and local teachers in instructional materials design, exercise and test questions’ compilation, as well as students’ self-study facilitation. The degree to which a local teacher should be involved in classroom teaching depends on the students’ academic level and learning needs.