Pandemic vs. communication in remote learning
by Angel Alvidrez, Andreia Merten andĚýAby Bonilla
In this pandemic, we’ve had to learn how to change the way we communicate and work. Given this factor, not everyone has found the best way to achieve this. There are three main points when it comes to communication that is relevant, but we chose to focus on communication with school faculty because it is the most significant one in the life of a college student. We wanted to compare how faculty in American colleges/universities are communicating with students vs faculty of universities in other countries. For this reason, we chose to reach out to students all over the world and get their insight on the matter. To do this we created a survey where the answers would provide us with the information we needed for our research. It consisted of four questions, one multiple-choice, one with checkboxes and two short answers. The survey was posted on our social media so we could get a wide range of responses. These are still being processed.
Communication with faculty, news and social media
Halfway through our semester, we had to transition to remote learning. This brought an overload of emails from teachers and the amount of information in each of them. It has become very overwhelming, which is a feeling shared by both students and teachers when trying to manage that information as best as possible. Communication with teachers has also been challenging because of the lack of a face to face interaction when discussing classes, schoolwork or asking questions, all has been done through Zoom and email.
When it comes to news, either through TV or the internet, we’ve found it hard to know which sources are reliable or not, due to all the misinformation on this virus. Misinformation has caused a sense of chaos, mistrust and fear for students and others.
In terms of social media, it has been a distraction for remote learning but also a way to communicate with friends we were used to seeing on a daily basis.
Communication with friends and family
When thinking of communication, we have noticed that staying in touch with friends and family is crucial for our mental and emotional health. And maintaining that, directly affects how we study, motivate ourselves and our work rhythm. In the case of people living with friends or family, it can be a distraction for remote learning, but it is still crucial to have good communication within that living space.
Self-communication, taking care of one’s self
At this time, taking care of your mental and physical health is very important. Schools provide various resources to have this foundation but with the transition to remote learning, these are harder to come by. Checking in on yourself, organizing your thoughts, making sure you can communicate your feelings to others, knowing when to ask for help and not being afraid of doing it, are essential parts of self-communication.
Having good communication with faculty, friends, family, and ourselves, is crucial to succeeding in this new college experience of remote learning. By next week we will have accumulated enough results to come to a conclusion on our research. This will provide feedback for teachers to provide better communication in future similar situations.
Survey Questions and Answers
After receiving all the results from our survey, we were able to further analyze our research. These were our results:
The answers we received from other countries came from the United Kingdom, Portugal and Japan. This provided us with a more global idea of how communication is being held between teachers and students.
We noticed a pattern when it came to how students were feeling about communication in remote learning, which consisted of stress and feeling overwhelmed. The answer choice “Overload of information” is a big contributing factor to both the stress and sense of being overwhelmed in students. We were also happy to hear that some students are satisfied with how teachers are communicating with them, this means something is working for them that others could use.
Our third question was:
What innovative ways have faculty found to communicate and give the right information to you?
The answers we obtained focused on recording lectures, zoom meetings, emails, group chats, collaborative meetings through computer outlets, remind texts, Whatsapp and blackboard email.
Some answers were more specific: “One of my instructors reminds us both during zoom lectures and emails to ensure we’re on track. The support he’s been providing us is very helpful during these difficult remote learning times.” and “Some faculty has personally reached out to find out how I've been doing and what ways they could help improve our class retention”. These responses provide great feedback to faculty because they include good ideas on how to communicate in more effective ways. These can be adopted by faculty almost effortlessly, in relation to the efforts already being put forward.
Our last question was:
What ways could faculty improve their communication?
We received very informative responses that provide good insight for teachers.
- “Less worksheets and more debates”;
- “Skype calls instead of emails”;
- “Possibly having longer online meetings”. This would allow faculty to have more time and opportunities to go over more important course material;
- “Asking how students are doing in the class now that we have switched, they could hand out surveys to see how everyone is doing.”;
- “I honestly think they communicate pretty well, sometimes they even over communicate stuff.”;
- “Text messages or calls. We could get the info faster”;
- “Teachers could try to use a discussion board specifically for questions regarding assignments, homework, etc... This way, if a student has a doubt, he can scroll through the chat to see if someone else has already asked the question”;
- “Make it specific to the class, my English class should not be run the same way as my Statistics class”;
- “My writing teacher uses Microsoft teams and I like it a lot, it makes me feel like she is more accessible”;
- “They could schedule more zoom tutoring sessions”;
- “It’s hard to think, considering that the best way is having classes in the university”;
- “They’re doing the best they can, it's a hard time for everyone so I don't really think there's an answer to that. I just wish both sides could be more understanding.”.
The feedback from the students who responded to the survey is very helpful because it will give teachers a better sense of how communication between them and students has been working or how it can improve. This research project has been an eye opener to the fact that a lot of students are feeling the same way we are and are facing the same challenges. This just shows how much we all underestimated face to face interaction with each other and faculty and how it can affect our college success. The situation we are in is unfamiliar and unusual for all of us, and that’s why working together and helping each other find better ways to navigate through this pandemic will be the key for both teachers and students’ success.