Abstract:

New challenges of providing the continuity of educational process in times of the COVID19 pandemic have exposed the necessity of assessing the impact caused by the lockdown conditions on psychosocial status of learners and teachers. Though on-line collaboration has proved its benefits under social distancing rules and restrictions - moreover it has prevented the educational process from disruption – the side effects and possible ramifications of the e-learning environment need analysis from various perspectives.

The paper provides early findings of the research of psychological and social barriers to learning which were discovered among students in the process of return to normal, face-to-face, forms of educational process. Psychosocial communication problems and difficulties of 105 students and 25 teachers were surveyed at three universities - the MGIMO University, Military University, MIIT University, a total of 130 respondents. The survey was conducted by means of face-to-face or on-line interviews. As part of the poll the respondents were asked if they experienced any difficulty in resuming social communication after the lockdown; if yes, what was the character of problems; if they surmounted the obstacles themselves or they needed help, and what contributed to their resuming social communication.

Among findings of special interest are as follows. As to the first question, 57 percent of the respondents testify to problematic aspects of psychosocial nature. The majority of such aspects can be grouped under the ‘time and effort - consuming/saving’ notion. The lack of sleep tops the list of hardships that respondents have to overcome when resume commuting to university and back home: it takes quite a lot of time to commute, whereas e-learning helps save a lot of time and effort. At the same time, nearly 15 percent consider that working with computers cause some health problems, even mental. Isolation and spending long hours in front of a computer have certain perilous impact on human health. These ramifications can be grouped under the ‘central coherence potential’ notion: the ability of processing a large amount of information from various sources and building up a coherent, integral map of reality.

The view that face-to-face forms of education are more beneficial for acquiring communication skills is predictably dominant. And abstaining from personal communication, eye-to-eye contact, hampers development of speech and social behaviour. This view is strongly held both by students and teachers. Answers to the questions about the so-called ‘social rehabilitation’ after lockdown reveal a very interesting tendency: the overwhelming majority (99 percent) of the respondents are happy to resume learning in class, by tradition, but at the same time many of them (85 per cent) claim that e-learning environment and digital forms of education should be further exploited and integrated in the educational process as very useful and effective.

Nowadays educators face a great challenge of meeting the demands of students and teaching staff who have acquired new experience and new skills of working in e-environment, on the one hand, and who still long for resuming traditional forms of education which they consider more beneficial for developing speech and social behaviour skills. Psychosocial barriers to learning caused by long periods of lockdown can evidently be surmounted by awakening students’ motivation and inclusiveness in social communication.

Keywords:

Learning environment, speech communication, on-line collaboration, social behaviour.