Abstract:

The spread of COVID-19 has led to the physical closure of schools and universities, accelerating the expansion of online learning methods. As all over the world, when COVID-19 emerged, Romanian universities had no option but to quickly adapt their way of teaching, adopting the online course delivery even for students that were going to undertake professions with a strong need for interpersonal relationship skills, as is the case for future social workers.

The main purpose of this paper is to describe our experience of developing and implementing a framework to quickly shifting practical teaching of social work students to online mode. School practice sessions aim to develop skills in future social workers such as application, analysis, and critical. This study focuses on a sample of Romanian students from the West University of Timisoara.

We used a phenomenological study design to explore social work students’ online learning challenges, coping strategies, and their perceptions of the professional skills they gained that will be used in a real life working context. Open-ended questionnaires were applied to students who are in their first, second and third year of a bachelor’s degree in social work. The responses were analyzed thematically using an inductive approach. Therefore, their perceptions of the learning experiences and practical skills are being examined and documented in this present study.

The evaluation of online learning differs depending on the specificities of the online environment, the different study abilities of each student, and the different teaching characteristics of professors. Because Romanian universities have autonomy in terms of their mission, institutional strategy, structure, activities, organization, and functioning, even though the education system is centralized, each university adopted a different strategy for this.
Even though online learning was carried out within a limited period of time, there are students that will soon graduate from the university and have followed the majority of courses in the online environment.

No face-to-face interaction, non-experiential learning, and adaptation to newer technology were the main barriers perceived in online practical seminars teaching.

Keywords:

COVID-19, social work, students, theoretical and practical skills perception, phenomenological study.