This week, we decided to choose the field of education exclusively. After further examining some of the information collected from last week’s interviews, we opted to focus on the communication between teachers and students during the Corona pandemic.
We interviewed both students and teachers and got to a few interesting finds regarding problems both students and teachers experience.What was surprising to us the most were problems both sides seem to suffer from. We concluded most of the problems we encountered originated in the means used to teach during the pandemic.
On the teacher’s side:
- There seems to be an extra effort required from the teacher on a day to day basis. Aside from the need to prepare a lesson plan, there are administrative actions required to be performed before each lesson. Before each class the teacher needs to contact the ministry of education, and only after a confirmation achieved by complying to specific rules has been sent back, can the teacher send a Zoom link to the class begin the lesson. After each lesson, a thorough report must be sent regarding the performance of the teacher, how much could he\she teach out of the content needed and other parameters for both tracking and evaluation.
- One of the biggest problems is communicating with students during class and observing how focused are they. Teachers can’t tell what the student is doing during lesson even with cameras open. The cameras do help at times better communicating but it’s not enough to gauge a student’s involvement and that is before the ones who prefer to not open their cameras embarrassment to be seen in home or overall shyness.
On the student’s side:
- There is the problem of distraction caused simply from sitting at home in front of the desk in the personal room. Students admit that during class they tend to focus on other things we are not related to the lesson or school is general. While it’s not new to hear about students sitting in class drawing or at times looking at their phones. The difference comes both from how many other things can the student do at home and the problem that teachers can’t track, especially if the cameras are closed, and even so, many of them set the cameras to awkward places rending them pointless.
- Another problem is the discomfort stemming from the use of cameras. It’s only natural that most people don’t like being watched through cameras for a long period. When we couple it with the need to sit through a lesson it makes it hard for even gifted students to focus. Many are shy about letting others see into their rooms, some have to sit in their living rooms where other house members roam and might be seen in a less than ideal situation. Some feel uncomfortable being seen through a camera making them take time to groom before class, especially in the case of girls putting on make-up. At the worst of cases students just turn off the camera entirely, creating some the problems already discussed.
- Another big problem is the overall communication with the teacher, during and after class hours. We found that students communicate with their teachers through Whatsapp, either through Whatsapp groups with their peers or even personally. They communicate with them in different times during the day, breaking the boundaries of time, place and distance between both sides.
Our next steps are to have interviews with professionals in education, psychology and technology, in order to receive a broader, more academic and educated set of insights. Furthermore, we’d want to speak with more students and teachers and ask specifically about the problems we have found.
