Abstract:

Higher education in Romania, as everywhere in the world, has witnessed radical changes since 2020, when measures taken against the spread of Covid 19 led to the establishment of long exclusively online sessions. The transition from remote to online has been a challenge for both teachers and students: on the one hand teachers have had to quickly change their tools and teaching strategies and accept the benefits of technology into the teaching process; on the other hand students had to accept new rules of conduct and communication conventions, as long as they enjoyed the comfort of their own private space, but still performing in the official context of the virtual class. Diminishing the effects of the pandemic and returning to onsite teaching is a partial resumption of old practices and their combination with new skills and expectations of students who have already understood and assumed the benefits of multimodal teaching. Therefore, teachers have to face another challenge, which is to keep students motivated to participate in physical education courses. But the major challenge is the context of the war in Ukraine, which led to the mass migration of Ukrainian students to Romanian universities. This state of affairs is problematic from two points of view; the first is that students must be integrated into an education system in which the Russian language is not used, so in a language environment unknown to them; the second is that they come from a different education system than the European one and further efforts are needed to identify opportunities for their integration as such. In this article we aim to present the teaching strategies adopted in our university in order to pursue, at the same time, the fulfillment of two currently intertwined goals: to preserve the skills of work and communication through technology, developed by students during the pandemic, but also those of maintaining the motivation for study and integration of students from Ukraine with the help of foreign students benefitting from scholarship in Romania that have previously settled here before the start of the war.

Keywords:

Remote, online, teaching strategies, linguistic integration, motivation.