How Did University Students Adapt to the “New Normal” of Teaching and Learning During the Pandemic? Preliminary Indications from Semi-structured Interviews

The Covid-19 pandemic, and subsequent lockdown of traditional universities determined, among other things, the sudden switch from a mostly exclusive form of teaching and learning in presence to a full-online mode, which has been called emergency remote teaching (ERT). A number of studies reported that students experienced many difficulties during this period, due to personal, contextual, and technological factors. At the same time, students used their resources and coping strategies to build resilient behaviors and adapt to this unprecedented situation. An inter-university, mixed-method study investigated how those factors combined to shape university students pandemic experience and develop better university teacher training protocols. As a part of this project, a semi-structured interview protocol has been developed to investigate in-deep phenomena, observations, and insights that can help lead to the redefinition of teaching and learning practices. This study presents the protocol that has been developed and implemented to collect student experiences and feelings towards different aspects of their pandemic experience, with the aim of building teacher trainings programs able to adapt to students’ coping strategies and foster their resilient behaviors. Preliminary results indicate that traditional universities might need to increase their push towards innovative instructional practices to face this challenge, while at the same time helping students build on the lessons learned during the pandemic period.