Abstract:

The pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 affected part of the world, manifesting a malaise. It has increased remote work and teaching, which has led many people to a state of social isolation. Schools had to adapt so that teaching and learning were not interrupted. In higher education approaches were implemented so that activities were not completely interrupted. Distance learning, previously used on a small scale, increased, and emergency remote learning was used as an option. In Brazil, some public federal universities opted for the special academic period (SAP). However, not all schools had the technical conditions to use online learning environments and some of the teachers were not prepared to take classes in fully distance learning, using effective instructional models. The students, especially the younger ones and those with less autonomy, also did not know how to take advantage of this new teaching and learning system. It is known that school success depends on many factors, one of them being the emotional states experienced by students and teachers in this new teaching modality, since emotions, especially negative ones, interfere with student learning. This study aimed to measure the emotional well-being and malaise of a group of students from the civil engineering course at a Brazilian public university, during the academic semester in which the classes were taught entirely online. Lemos (2015) says that motivation should be valued in school contexts because it produces better learning and influences performance, confidence in oneself and produces greater satisfaction in carrying out the work. A scale of emotional well-being and malaise developed by Rebollo Catalán, Pérez, Sánchez, Garcia and Caro (2008) was applied, based on the constructivist and historical/cultural theory of emotions. This scale is a two-dimensional instrument for measuring the emotional state of students during online learning. It aims to assess the type and degree to which positive and negative emotions are experienced in the online learning process. The results we obtained showed that the 38 subjects in the sample (n = 38) used the internet daily for different purposes, for more than 4 hours a day. Twenty-seven considered that they had sufficient computer knowledge for their needs and 22 that they had never attended an online course. Only 16 of the 38 participants responded to both scales. Among the 20 positive emotions (on a scale of 0 to 4, where 0 means “never” I felt this emotion, 1 I felt “occasionally”, 2 “on many occasions” and 3 “always”) the emotions most felt on many occasions by the majority of the respondents (between seven and eight of the 16) were: feeling “accompanied”, “competent”, “calm”, “proud” and “perseverant”, with 11 who felt “guided” on many occasions. The positive emotion most felt by most of the participants was “perseverance”. With regard to the 20 negative emotions, which used the same 4-point scale, 11 participants said they often felt “annoyed”, 10 “apathetic or unwilling”, and seven felt “anxious”, “frustrated”, “upset and “tired or stressed”. The negative emotion least felt by the 16 respondents was “disgust”, and there are also some who never felt “guilt”, “sadness”, “loneliness”, “disorientation” and “regret”. Understanding which emotional states were perceived by students during remote teaching is important because emotions interfere, positively and negatively, in learning and motivation to learn.

Keywords:

COVID-19, Distance learning, Online Emotions, Open Distance Learning, Scales of emotional well-being and malaise.