‘Thrown into a deep water’, often without any preparation, boring classes, increased screen time and clearly lowered mental and physical wellbeing – that is how students, parents and teachers ended the last school year, as the research „Zdalne nauczanie a adaptacja do warunków społecznych w czasie epidemii koronawirusa” (Remote Teaching and Adapting to Social Implications of Coronavirus Epidemic) proves. The aim of the research was to investigate what students, parents and teachers think about remote teaching, how they adapted, what emotions they experienced and whether they received appropriate support in that matter. Faculty of Social Sciences (WNS) of the University of Gdańsk partners in the research project.

The organizers of the project are: Polish Association for Media Education, Dbam o Mój Zasięg (I care about my coverage) Foundation and Orange Foundation. The research has been conducted under the auspices of the Faculty of Educational Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Gdańsk and the Faculty of Humanities at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow. The research team is composed of: dr hab. Grzegorz Ptaszek, prof. AGH, Chairman of the Polish Association for Media Education - Principal Investigator, dr hab. Jacek Pyżalski, prof. UAM, dr Maciej Dębski form UG Faculty of Social Sciences and Chairman of Dbam o Mój Zasięg Foundation, dr Grzegorz Stunża form UG Faculty of Social Sciences and Magdalena Bigaj from Dbam o Mój Zasięg Foundation.

The research was conducted in 34 primary and secondary Polish schools. 1284 students, 979 parents and 671 teachers participated. Learning about those three groups helped reveal the full picture of how parties coped with remote teaching.

Here are the most significant findings:

Wellbeing area:

• Students, parents and teachers claim that their current mental and physical condition is worse compared to the pre-pandemics.
• Worsening of mental and physical condition affects mainly teachers, then parents.
• Around 20% of students claim that their mental and physical condition improved compared to the pre-pandemics.
• Screen and internet time during remote teaching period significantly increased among the examined groups of students and teachers. That does not only relate to weekdays but also weekends.
• Students, parents and teachers show clear symptoms of digital media abuse. Fatigue, information overload, aversion to computer and the internet and annoyance caused by constant ICT use are the most common symptoms of digital fatigue.

Technology and digital competences area:

• Almost 60% of parents believe the preparation of teachers and schools for remote teaching is at least good.
• 45% of teachers feel insufficiently or moderately prepared to hold remote classes.
• Teachers usually use demonstrative teaching methods (displaying movies, presentations, publishing content), they use much less of collaborative methods (quizzes, group work and mutual online work)
• Half of the examined students believe remote classes are less appealing than conventional classes pre-pandemics.

Relations area:

• Half of the students believe peer relations within the classrooms were better before the pandemics.
• One in five students feels that their relationship with a home room teacher was better before the pandemics.
• Teachers often indicate(in open questions) that they miss direct, offline relations with students.
• Remote teaching negatively influences home/ personal relations of many teachers.

The report concerning ‘Remote Teaching and Adapting to Social Implications of Coronavirus Epidemic’ research findings has just been presented in a book „Edukacja zdalna: co stało się z uczniami, ich rodzicami i nauczycielami?” (Remote teaching: what happened to students, their parents and teachers?) and made available for free to entities that shape education in Poland. The document with guidelines for preparing teachers, parents and students to implement digital education and remote teaching in formal education: to download

Translation: Adam Myzyk