Abstract:

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic many educational institutes have had to change the delivery of their teaching content to now teach exclusively on-line. This has been a dramatic and traumatic change for many lecturers and students, with many types of interactions taken for granted in a face-to-face context, suddenly become more complex and uncertain. Lecturers who have taught exclusively classrooms tend rely on observing their students’ facial expressions, body language and interactions with others in the class as a guide to how well their material is being received, but in an on-line context it may not possible to make these observations.

Similarly, in a face-to-face setting when students are asking questions, the lecturer-student interaction can be very dynamic including a wide range of verbal and non-verbal cues that help the communication process, and these are not always present in an online environment. When working online the lecturer-student communication can become more challenging with various synchronous and asynchronous modes of communication being used. Each of these modes of communication can result in many exchanges to clarify the exact problem or question the student may have. This can take some time to resolve and can led to some frustrations for both the lecturer and student. Similar observations have been reported in various industries, for example with IT Support, where much time can be exhausted on clarifying the exact problem.

To address these issues, and with a secondary aim of preparing students communicate more effectively in industry, a framework has been developed consisting of examples of how to research the problem, how to frame and state the problem, checklists, and template communications (the Clarity Collection), to help the students effectively ask questions in a more coherent and comprehensive fashion. This collection has been delivered to two class groups (N=53) undertaking a Masters in Computer Science. Examples of communication exchanges was gathered including those before and after the Clarity Collection was delivered. Feedback from lecturers and students was gathered to assess the level of changes and effectiveness of the communications. Feedback indicates an increase in overall satisfaction with both the lecturers and students, with a reduction in the number of communications, while at the same time students receiving a quicker resolution to their problems.

Keywords:

Learning to Learn, Problem Definition, Getting Help, Remote Learning.