Almost 60 percent of students do not watch TV lessons – Society

On the other hand, lack of live communication and socialization, difficulties in monitoring and evaluating students, lack of digital resources, teacher overload, as well as the inability to provide adequate support and assistance to students, are the major shortcomings of distance learning from the perspective of educators.

High school students themselves are aware of the problems of evaluation and transcription, of the difficulty of concentrating and organizing learning, but also of harmonizing with other members of the family (sharing computers, programming …). They lack society and school in general, are some of the conclusions of the investigation of the Institute of Pedagogical Research in Belgrade.

Associate researchers from this institute Smiljana Jošić, Ivana Đerić and Nada Ševa prepared and implemented research on distance learning during the first wave of pavidemia caused by the kovid 19 virus.

Due to the suspension of regular classes and the urgent transition to distance education, the researchers sought to describe and consider the dynamics of the distance education process from the perspective of various actors in the educational system.

The data was collected through online questionnaires created specifically for high school students, teachers, parents, and professional partners.

QUALITY AND STRUCTURE OF TEACHING

The pandemic has forced education systems to organize the learning process in an online context and has put many countries in a position to prepare and implement distance learning for almost 1.5 billion students around the world in a short time.

Our education system has created numerous initiatives (for example, TV school, My TeslaEdu classroom, Digital Serbia, National Education Portal), but has also faced many difficulties during the preparation and implementation of distance learning, which was confirmed by this investigation. Teachers in Serbia have also applied different strategies when working with students, trying to respond professionally to the challenges they have faced.

Chat applications (Viber, WhatsApp, Messenger, Zoom) were an indispensable tool in daily work for 60 percent of teachers and 86 percent of teachers.

About 60 percent of teachers and 70 percent of teachers did not use the school website adapted to distance learning, and the reason is that most of the schools did not even have platforms ready for this type of work . A quarter of the teachers surveyed and 17 percent of the teachers said they used the online classroom every day.

Parents say that 85% of teachers did not use lectures or video calls for the whole class, a similar percentage attests that teachers in upper elementary school did not, but this way of working was more pronounced in secondary schools, because 57% of teachers used it.

Judging from the data, a negligible number of teachers relied only on television lessons during distance learning. The reason for this is that they were not sufficiently harmonized with the teaching and learning curriculum that the students followed.

Thus, 62% of secondary school teachers regularly sent content to students that they normally sent before the start of the pandemic. About half of the teachers who participated in the research found ways to provide distance learning materials on their own, but they also relied on colleagues from their own school and, to a lesser extent, colleagues from other schools.

Up to 58 percent of the students testified that they did not watch television classes and 28 percent did so occasionally. For 73 percent of teachers and half of teachers, teaching through the public service channel was helpful.

FEEDBACK

Providing clear, complete and timely feedback is one of the most important teaching skills, both in regular classes and during distance learning, which was confirmed by this research.

Educators have more dilemmas about how to assess whether students were independent in learning and are aware that it is difficult to reliably assess students in a distance learning situation. For many teachers, the formative follow-up was a burden due to the large number of students and the tasks that had to be reviewed, which took a long time.

About 70 percent of the parents of children who attend classes with a teacher and 87 percent of those whose children are in higher grades report having received feedback on student learning through an electronic journal.

On the other hand, 45% of educators indicate that they recorded the progress of their students in pedagogical notebooks, the same percentage corrected tasks every day and sent feedback to students, a quarter did it once a week, and the same number two to three times a week.

A third of high school students testified that they received homework feedback once a week, 43 percent two to three times a week, and a fifth each day.

Yet nearly one in five students report that teachers have never discussed homework with them, 37 percent say they do it once a week, and 30 percent two or three times a week.

About 80 percent of professional associates estimated that it is not always possible to give quality and additional explanations during distance learning when students do not understand, and 55 percent say that children received incomplete feedback on the tasks they perform.

COMMUNICATION, RESOURCES AND SUPPORT

Ongoing communication and regular information to educators was an important aspect of the efficient implementation of distance learning, as evidenced by the data from this research.

In the first two months of the pandemic, professional associates and teachers were more informed through the websites of official institutions dealing with educational activities, colleagues were also a useful source of information, as well as blogs nationals dealing with education.

Educators were less likely to search for useful information on foreign distance learning sites.

In terms of resources, the expert associates who participated in the research estimate that for the largest number of teachers (96 percent) and students (89 percent) they had technical devices and the Internet to do distance learning.

More than half of the parents of students from first to fourth grade had to share a computer or laptop with their children until they fulfilled their school obligations. This is also the case for 42% of those whose children go on to grades above eight, while this problem is less pronounced in families where children attend secondary school.

For ten percent of teachers and seven percent of teachers, the fact that they are not technically equipped is a major limitation, and that is sometimes a problem for a fifth of the respondents.

A third of the limiting factor is that they don’t have enough Internet in the package they own, but a much bigger problem is the lack of space to store the work they receive from students.

77 percent of the teachers agree that the support of the educational authorities was insufficient in the previous period. Expert associates have the most objections to the fact that education authorities are constantly setting new requirements and instructions (79 percent), while 68 percent estimate that the support they receive from them is insufficient.

A large percentage of teachers agree that their parents had assistants when organizing distance education, and 70% of teachers believe that they did. A quarter of teachers indicate they did not have sufficient support from professional associates and principals, with which 18 percent of teachers agree.

Students worked harder

About 80 percent of parents whose children were in the lower grades of primary school confirm that a daily learning routine has been established, that percentage is somewhat lower in the upper grades of primary school: 70 percent, but in high school, almost half of those surveyed say otherwise.

Parents estimated that their children needed almost four hours to complete their daily obligations during the distance learning period.

About two-thirds of the founders’ parents believe their children had more school obligations than before, and 55 percent of the parents of high school students agree with that. Interestingly, however, between 22 and 25 percent of parents say that their children feel exhausted and tired almost every day.

More than half of the parents of elementary and middle school students felt that they were not competent to support children during learning, or to motivate them, but in concrete examples of that process, parents showed enviable teaching skills, the researchers concluded. .

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