Abstract:

In early 2020, a lethal virus caused a pandemic on a global scale. The Covid-19 pandemic brought numerous changes in our daily lives, due to sanitary measures and social distancing. The education sector was one of the most affected. In order to give continuity to the school year, the face-to-face teaching activities were replaced by the remote learning modality. If the digital technologies were already used, as resources to support the teaching-learning process, they became, in this pandemic context, a main artefact of remote teaching. In this sense, this communication aims to capture the perceptions of remote teaching on the learning, health and well-being of 1st year higher education students from 2 different courses (the Degree in Basic Education to train teachers and the Degree in Video Games aimed at training higher technical staff in this area of knowledge). The methodology used was the construction and application of a questionnaire to all 1st year students of these two courses in two higher education institutions (university and polytechnic) in order to make a comparative study of students from different socio-cultural and economic conditions and with different levels of prerequisites in the field of digital technologies. Data were collected via online questionnaire, composed of questions divided into multiple-choice and open-ended categories. The treatment of the questionnaire integrates the quantitative method (multiple choice questions) and discourse analysis for the open questions. The results show that the students of the Degree in Education have adapted well to remote teaching (convenience and protection against contagion) although they refer to the negative impact of remote teaching on sociabilities that compromises interaction and pedagogical relationship. They also show that remote education mirrors and deepens the social inequality between students in terms of both computer equipment and digital resources. They show little awareness of the problem of online safety. For Video Game students, remote learning is seen as providing more comfort, greater value for time and more security in the face of the pandemic. They are aware of and active on the issue of online safety. And they see remote learning as an evolutionary process through cyber and internet, and the pandemic as a factor that accelerated a process, which was already underway, of integration between technology and education. In both courses, students note that remote learning has as a negative consequence the lack of sociability and socialisation, a factor intrinsic to the human condition.

Keywords:

Remote teaching, Degree in Video Games, Degree in Basic Education.