Post-pandemic pedagogy: Emergency remote teaching impact on students with functional diversity

Abstract

The Covid-19 outbreak caused transition from face-to-face teaching to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). Due to the hastily and disorganized implementation of ERT considerable difficulties were caused for all the students. Aim of the present study was to investigate (i) parents' views of students with functional diversity regarding ERT during the Covid-19 pandemic and (ii) how their children's functional diversity affected participation in ERT. ERT proved to be an even greater challenge for those students, who faced various learning, psychological and technical problems that further hindered the learning process. In the current research, the views of 12 parents of students with functional diversity were collected with semi-structured interviews. A Modern Greek dataset of qualitative humanistic-linguistic data was created. A novel type of data analysis, combining qualitative descriptive analysis by hand and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based linguistic analysis was performed on the interview text. Results revealed (i) how those students responded to ERT, (ii) the way that their functional diversity affected their attendance on the online courses and (iii) how their parents evaluate the educational dimension of ERT along with any changes noticed in their children's psychological and emotional state. Parents' evaluations disclosed the overall negative impact of ERT on their children and presented their suggestions for meeting their children's special needs in case of ERT appliance in the future. The current research is considered significant as it investigates ERT impact on K-12 students with functional diversity during the Covid-19 pandemic, based on authentic humanistic data. Our research contributes on (i) the creation of this kind of dataset, as this particular group of students is hard to come by and their collection constitutes a significant contribution and (ii) the two-fold way data analysis methodology, which is novel, combining linguistic and qualitative processes (semantic and sentiment analysis), providing important findings.

Keywords: Covid-19; Emergency remote teaching (ERT); Inclusive education; Information and Communications Technologies (ICT); Students with functional diversity; e-learning.