Abstract:

After months of remote teaching due to the pandemic, all university classes have now returned to their original classroom face to face environment in September 2022. However, the Covid-19 pandemic disruption may have become the new normal for many students and professors. The return to in-person education presents them with new unanticipated challenges, especially to students and instructors who had a positive experience with online and remote learning. Two years of isolation, and learning in front of a computer without actual physical encounters, made the return to class a little strange at first. Human beings can eventually adapt to any situations, the same goes for teaching and learning. There was a feeling of excitement upon returning to class, but at the same time, there was the nostalgia of learning in the comfort of their home. Everybody reacts differently and class attendance has not returned to the level it was before the pandemic. This pedagogical study will attempt to explore and understand human behavior and the concept of normality for students of various gender, age, and background. Are there any lingering effects from our isolation experience that we retain going back to the classroom?

An online survey conducted in two groups of students, one undergraduate and one graduate in a Business school in Canada is used to collect information at the end of the Fall 2022 semester to understand the situation. Text mining methodology is utilized to analyse students’ answers to open ended questions concerning their experience of returning to in-class instruction and relates it to demographics. Feedbacks from several instructors are also being reviewed. Results show that students’ absenteeism is often due to health ailment and personal difficulties for themselves and / or family members and the virtual support is still very much needed.

Keywords:

Online teaching, face-to-face environment, blended learning.