Lecturer Autoethnographies of Adjusting to Online Student Interactions during COVID-19

Abstract

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed South African historically disadvantaged institutions, that had not yet reached advanced levels of technology use in teaching and learning, to find immediate solutions to salvage the disrupted academic year. Interactions with students, which had predominantly been face-to-face, shifted to various online platforms for lecturers to adopt emergency remote teaching approaches. Most of the lecturers were unprepared or incapacitated to make the shift to online environment. Studies have looked at the online teaching and learning experiences of students and lecturers during the COVID-19 pandemic but very few have taken an autoethographic approach to their inquiry and situated experiences in historically disadvantaged institutions. In this article, as lecturers, we use autoethnographies to provide an account of adjusting to interacting with students online during national lockdowns at a historically disadvantaged institution. The Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) was applied to guide the study. This reflexive approach is valuable, as it captures professional encounters and reflections needed to understand the effects of rapid changes to teaching and learning in response to the pandemic. Given the education disparities that already existed between South African higher education institutions before COVID-19, the article contributes to the discourse on how historically disadvantaged institutions can advance higher standards of teaching and learning to serve students better. Our reflections point to the personal, technical and structural challenges of maintaining regular online interaction. Our findings show that different approaches and techniques were applied to adjust to virtual teaching and learning. As teaching and learning methodologies have the potential to ingrain social inequalities, we made recommendations on how to improve online interactions with students from historically disadvantaged contexts.

African Studies Keyword: Autoethnography

“…But even those who do not explicitly think of their research as entailing “fieldwork” have usually spent time in the communities from which the writers, filmmakers, and other culture workers they study have emerged, and their writing benefits from the self-reflexivity that autoethnography requires (e.g., Julien 2016). The COVID-19 pandemic has also forced many would-be fieldworkers to develop new projects that do not require travel, and autoethnography has become valuable in documenting those shifts (e.g., Makwembere, Matarirano, & Jere 2021; Perumal et al 2021; Stevens et al 2021; Adiku 2022).…”

Unintended Pedagogical Consequences of Emergency Remote Teaching at a Rural-Based University in South Africa

“…Emergency remote teaching is well documented in the literature globally since the eruption of the coronavirus pandemic (see, for instance, [7][8][9]). Scholars have reported on the results of empirical studies conducted in different contexts including higher education.…”

“…Scholars have reported on the results of empirical studies conducted in different contexts including higher education. However, only a few studies were conducted at the researched site [5,8,9] and other RBUs in South Africa. Given their segregated nature, some universities were able to adapt more seamlessly to the remote teaching and learning environment than others [5].…”

“…Subsequently, students' access to learning resources and academic support was limited during the transition to ERT at RBUs. Furthermore, some lecturers teaching at RBUs lacked the technological [5,8,9] and pedagogical expertise required to teach online and/or in blended learning environments [10]. Although ERT was deemed to be the most viable pedagogical solution during the time of the pandemic, its implementation was unplanned [5] and may not have been appropriate for everyone at the RBUs.…”

Social Health and Psychological Safety of Students Involved in Online Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Furthermore, the pandemic opened the door to the new technologies that would endure in the classroom after the disaster subsided [ 5 ]. COVID-19 highlighted that the higher educational institutions (HEIs) were crucial as the providers of education, as well as being spaces for responding to socio-emotional needs and for supporting the well-being of vulnerable students [ 6 , 7 ]. Due to the lockdowns and the necessity to conduct distance learning, many institutions started using educational technology driven by artificial intelligence (AI) that predicts the navigational behavior of learners, allows for the real-time identification of pedagogically valuable behaviors, and acts as an online personalized tutor that can assess students’ strengths and weaknesses and deliver individual instructions [ 8 , 9 ].…”