Understanding the Emotional and Psychological Reflections of the Engineering Students on the Remote Teaching as a New Pedagogical Practice

The conventional classroom methods of instruction in engineering education have been transformed into online lectures or remote teaching in recent months. This sudden transformation of pedagogy has largely influenced the cognitive ability of the students including emotional and psychological attributes. Therefore it has become necessary to understand the students' reflections on this pedagogical transformation towards making remote teaching more learner-centric. The present study manifests the emotional and psychological challenges experienced by the students during online learning. An anonymous online survey has been conducted to collect actual data. The survey has been conducted for all the students from 3,5, and 7 semesters at the Department of Civil Engineering degree course offered by the Marwadi University, Rajkot, Gujarat, India to obtain the differences or similarities in the responses towards the questionnaire. The responses of 111 students have been collected. The online survey form has been designed to offer 19 questions on emotional, psychological aspects, and creative suggestions. The Chisquare method and standard deviation have been utilized for the analysis and interpretation of the data and to observe the degrees of differences or similarities in the reflections. The trends of suggestions on the specific situations are also analyzed by the Chi-square method and the standard deviation. The Chi-square analysis revealed that irrespective of the level of maturities, gender, semesters, and styles of learning, the responses are similar towards the questions related to the likes and dislikes of the remote teaching and largely owing to the sudden change in the conventional pedagogy, the students are not fully comfortable. On the other hand, a trend of similar suggestions to improvise the pedagogy of remote teaching has been observed.