Abstract:

In the spring of 2017, Institute of Philology and Intercultural Communication of Kazan Federal University hosted the web conference “Have a Hoot with Kahoot!” for its students. The presenter was a professor from the US University. For the first time, students were given an opportunity to take part in the live communication with an American educator across the Atlantic Ocean. Russian students got acquainted with the unique and unknown to them technology Kahoot! which is actively used in teaching foreign languages abroad. That way did distant teaching start in the Institute of Philology and Intercultural Communication. Further on, there were held a good number of other on-line events. Those on-line classes were new, interesting and appealing to students and teachers. But these classes were just episodes: it was not a system, for there had always been practiced face-to-face teaching on campus. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything. On-line classes become systematic arousing a series of new challenges that underlie remote teaching, and turn out to be a must. Teaching moves on-line on an untested and unprecedented scale.

The goal of this study is to investigate how the pandemic affects the educational system in Russia. The research question is: What advantages and disadvantages does remote teaching have in students’ and teachers’ eyes? Literature review shows that although each scholar touches upon both positive and negative aspects of distance education, all of them agree on the following. While organizing and conducting remote teaching, teachers ought to remember that:

· the focus should be on pedagogy and learning, rather than technology;

· all the tools still require the skill, experience and expertise of a teacher: good teachers might use bad technologies or use technologies badly and bad teachers can use good technologies;

· the tools teachers choose should be in line with any school e-Safety policy [23].

In this study, the leading research method is a web-based questionnaire, which allows the authors to collect definitive and objective data to quantify attitudes of nearly 4,000 respondents (university students and teachers) to remote teaching. The questionnaire is designed in a manner to legitimize the behavior and trust of the respondents. A rating scale type of questions provides for simplifying and quantifying the attitude and/ or behavior of the respondents, e.g., The COVID-19 pandemic is first and foremost a health crisis: Strongly Disagree; Disagree; Neither agree nor disagree; Agree; Strongly Agree; e.g., Are you satisfied with the fact that traditional exams are replaced with online assessment tools?: Very satisfied; Satisfied; Neutral; Dissatisfied; Very Dissatisfied.

A quantitative research is chosen to quantify a problem and understand how prevalent it is by looking for results that can be projected to a larger population and in this way to help see the big picture. A mathematical tool to derive results from the collected data is implemented.

This quantitative research results in getting the answer to the question “Does teaching remotely have only minuses, or does it also have its pluses?” The answer is: “Both”. The paper also presents a description of University teachers and students’ experiences of on-line teaching and learning.

Keywords:

Advantages and disadvantages of distant teaching, effects of COVID-19 lockdown on the educational system, implementations and limitations of remote teaching, on-line classes in the digital learning environments.