This chapter will address results of LE@D's project “Teaching in Times of Emergency: Digital Transition,” which focused on the experience of rapid digital transition to an “emergency teaching,” a scenario quite different from distance education. Through a mixed methods approach, data was collected through an online questionnaire applied to students and videoconference interviews conducted with both higher education faculty and students. Participants in this research are students and faculty from eight Portuguese higher education institutions, four from universities (three public and one private) and four from polytechnic institutes (three public and one private), covering the regions of Lisbon and Tagus Valley, Alentejo and Algarve (Central and Southern Portugal). In this chapter, the authors present a preliminary analysis of the results obtained related to the psychological aspects experienced during this period, aiming at understanding the impact this shift has had on students' cognitive adaptation and social and emotional processes.
TopIntroduction
The past one and a half year has been of change for higher education students and faculty, as a consequence of the CoViD-19 pandemic, and the transition to emergency remote teaching and learning.
During the periods of lockdown, higher education institutions (HEI) have experienced new situations that involved the closure of physical campus spaces and a gigantic disruption, while transitioning to online teaching and learning, on an unprecedented scale. In general, institutional responses were given with a rapid shift to emergency digital learning, in what Zimmerman (2020) classified as the “Great Online-Learning Experiment” and Wu (2020) defined as a test of organisational agility, which evidenced the resilience of the actors and educational organisations involved.
Although there was scarce time to adequately plan or structure what was being implemented, there was a strong level of innovation across all practices. The fact that faculty were poorly prepared to face digital teaching and learning, as well as the great opportunity raised by the pandemic, gave origin to several studies in order to understand the impact of this pandemic situation in education. For instance, Crawford, et al. (2020) analysed the type and speed of responses provided in higher education, through a meta-analysis conducted across 20 countries, particularly during the first lockdown. They focused mainly on how content was moved to the online environment without an appropriate pedagogy adapted for online teaching and learning. Thus, it is important to highlight the fact that the framework is what authors like Murphy (2020) call “emergency eLearning” or Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT),
a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis circumstances. It involves the use of fully remote teaching solutions for instruction or education that would otherwise be delivered face-to-face or as blended or hybrid courses and that will return to that format once the crisis or emergency has abated. The primary objective in these circumstances is not to re-create a robust educational ecosystem but rather to provide temporary access to instruction and instructional support in a manner that is quick to set up and is reliably available during an emergency or crisis (Hodges et al., 2020, p. 3).
All this situation has brought distance education to the forefront, introducing strong reflections and inevitable comparisons. According to Bozkurt and Sharma (2020), the distinction made between ERT and distance education determines “the degree to which educators believe in distance education these days will play a significant role in the prosperity of distance education in a post-COVID world” (p. 2).
While innovation was a positive feature noted during the transition to ERT during this period, some aspects were noted as to be improved, such as the centrality of the teaching strategies remaining on the faculty, a specificity of classroom teaching, however inadequate to online-based education. Bates (2019) mentioned that some of the pedagogical practices developed tended to be teacher-centred, instead of student-centred, as usual in distance learning. This pedagogical aspect is key to a successful online teaching strategy, hence the author concluded there is a need to look for practices that would contribute to focus the student's attention on the teaching-learning processes, coming closer to the student’s central role for a successful online educational process.
Thus, the focus of this research aimed at understanding specific dimensions of students' experiences that are sometimes less valued in face-to-face classes but are inseparable from the design of the significant and participative pedagogical scenarios involved in online teaching. At the same time, it was important to research the often-widespread idea that the richness of emotional communication is poorer in online environments than in face-to-face environments (Quintas-Mendes, Morgado & Amante, 2008,), including the assumption that the richness of online emotional communication is linked to the adequacy of the strategies used (Derks, Fischer & Bos, 2008; Paiva, Giger, Faísca & Batista, 2011).