Need for Silence, Craving for Communication: The Dyad Digital Education and Soft Skills in an Emerging Economy Context

Abstract

Business education has been endeavouring to keep up with an evolving real-world business environment. Despite signs of progress and advances, there's still a long way to go: the civilizational challenges from today figure themselves as a daunting task that future proves the career being developed within business schools today. Sustainable development complex challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, and inequalities have been addressed through educational technologies for a long time. They come into hand to create academic semantics out of complexity. Soft skills and digitalization find common ground in the COVID-19 context since the systemic crisis changes the shape of interaction and e-learning. In this scenario, high education institutions act as living labs for educational innovations alongside crisis management. Here we aim to scope how the business schools are managing the crisis scenario. We describe how a Brazilian institution promoted the digitalization of its teaching activities and how students felt during this process through a case study. Results indicate that students did not face issues related to digital literacy or readiness. Most challenges are linked to resource constraint setups, such as internet access and a proper place to study. Students also related their need for peer interaction, counselling and tutoring activities. Resilience, social and emotional skill has shown to be the essential feature of distance education's learning challenges.