Abstract:

Educators are facing a challenge where students are dealing with social anxiety and social phobias, which can cause students to lose interest, perform poorly and fail to stay engaged. Educators need to find ways to keep these students from being alienated by this problem. One of the significant influences on the lecture format is the evolution and continuous advancement of technology. First, books became available for the people and then later with vast resources at our fingertips, the Internet became a dominating player in educational work. There are conflicting opinions from researchers and educators who claim that the traditional lecture is dead. However, the traditional lecture has existed for several centuries, whereas newer educational technology and pedagogical methods have been around for mere decades. Therefore, replacing the foundations of lecture-student interactions, perfected over centuries, for technologies that are still relatively young, may be premature. What educators need to consider, is that whilst technology, content and learning materials have changed, students are also changing. This paper will aim to shed light on changes in students with a focus on social anxiety issues, that exist not only in the traditional classroom but also in digital and online classes that make use of new technologies. Social Anxiety can be so debilitating and stressful that it has a considerable impact on the students' education and learning potential. Online and distance education brings another dimension to this complex issue. Think about the student's ability to focus and how the environment they are in effect the student's ability to concentrate and grasp the concepts that teachers explain. This could be attributed as mere distractions, but it could also be because they are anxious about the interactions, perhaps the authority of a lecturer, or in an online environment the fact that they are on a web camera and need to participate. Social anxiety could also affect dropout rates amongst online students as they would be more likely to give up when they perceive something as too difficult. The paper uses data from the results of a questionnaire based on the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale, which indicate that over 70% of the students probably have issues related to social anxiety. A somewhat unexpected result is that it applies equally to both campus-based students and online students. This paper not only discusses the anxiety levels with regards to learning activities but also takes into consideration other areas of social interaction, establishing a link between the social difficulties and scholarly activities. The discussion in this paper will seek to explain the results obtained from the questionnaire.

Keywords:

Online Education, Cyberpsychology, Social Anxiety.