Saturday evening on the 7th March will surely go down in history. The sight of hundreds of citizens running through Milan’s railway stations looking to catch a train back home. Why? To escape the town before the “red zone” lockdown restrictions came into effect in Lombardy, Veneto, Piedmont, Marche and Emilia Romagna regions.
On 11th March, the whole of Italy went into lockdown, the first European country to do so. Of course, by then almost all Italian universities had already closed their buildings. In Lombardy, for example, they stopped in-person teaching on 24th February and started planning how to continue learning for students. Soon after, with Covid-19 spreading rapidly across the globe, students the world over were ordered into lockdown.
Since then, based on each university’s capability at setting up its remote learning platform, students have attended lessons, thesis discussions, and taken exams from home. Even graduation ceremonies moved online, with social feeds flooded with pictures of students graduating “in pyjamas”. It’s only since the start of the 20/21 academic year that some universities have accepted students back on campus.
Back in March, our Reply Ambassadors team — made up of students from several universities in Italy, Germany, and the UK — was caught up in the pandemic’s disruption. To analyse this disruption, Reply Social Network ran a survey in August.
The survey focused on three key areas:
- How well the online strategies adopted by universities worked.
- How students perceived the experience of studying only through online platforms without physical interaction.
- Changes students would like to see in remote learning and any future possibilities.
The pandemic’s impact on student performance
The answers confirmed the impact of the virus and showed its overwhelmingly negative effect on students.
Without a doubt, the lockdown affected everyone, but particularly young people. The Se-B-COVID-19 research from Oxford University (published in May and directed by Università di Padova’s professors Silan and Dalla Zuanna), showed 85% of young people between 18 and 29 years have struggled with depression, anxiety and boredom.
Isolation affected students’ lives deeply: seeing friends, meeting new people, talking to fellow students and professors in class, and joining in university life — all have been missed. And not being able to see friends face to face, was particularly hard as teaching moved online.
In fact, excluding the quantity and quality of course content, the biggest negative impact on student performance was moving to a digital-only learning environment.
In-person lectures and exams have been replaced by Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft and Google Forms, while hands-on workshops have been cancelled. This new environment has made students feel more tired and more bored. It’s also made it harder to concentrate. Another drawback mentioned by several students was the inability to ask questions because of all the chat messages, or worse, a poor internet connection.
Last but not least, spending hours watching a screen to attend lectures also stressed students physically, in particular, their eyes.
But it wasn’t all bad…
A few students responded that being at home helped them plan their routine better, as they no longer had to commute to university. “No wasted time travelling, so more time for studying” one student pointed out.
With less of a commute, there was more time for hobbies and the chance to watch or re-watch lectures. Some of our responders said this helped them achieve better exam results. So despite most students being negatively affected by the pandemic’s consequences, there was a group who benefitted from remote learning.
“It disheartened me to start with, but then I got back into my normal routine.”
This answer shows how the difference between positive and negative feedback can be down to how quickly individuals adapt to a new learning environment, which as we have seen, has its weaknesses.
How will universities restart?
In most cases, it involves universities offering a mix of onsite lessons, online learning, or online video only.
We asked what they would like to see next semester and the answer is probably originated from the knowledge that university structures are now inadequate for this new socially distanced normality.
Students’ proposals
But what if the students had to shape their own online learning experience? How would they develop it? Would the platforms and teaching methods resemble the same ones used during a lockdown?
This is the last topic the survey explored and the results were both interesting and varied.
Some proposals follow the “communication” directive. For example, giving students more opportunity to speak, so setting aside a set amount of time for students to ask questions or make comments. Or splitting students into smaller groups to interact with professors, who can’t always spot questions in a platform’s chatbox.
Other suggestions included providing students with assignments or projects to help them plan their study time better. Or varying teaching and learning methods including pre-recorded lessons shared in advance, external videos to explain course materials, or fun quizzes to create a “break (but still enriching) moment”.
Last but not least, some pointed out the need for uniformity across platforms because having to attend different courses using different software led to more problems and bugs.
Without doubt, the pandemic has been an unexpected and huge challenge that we’ve all had to (and are still) facing. Here’s one answer to the survey’s last question, that we feel sums up how difficult it is for universities to move from an offline experience to a fully on-line one:
“I have no idea. It’s quite tough to keep a high level of quality.”
