THE SIGNIFICANCE AND INTERPRETATIONS OF DIDACTIC COMMUNICATION IN AN ONLINE ENVIRONMENT

<doi>10.24250/jpe/1/2022/LCT</doi>

Abstract

The educational process, as a communication relationship, involves the teacher-student interaction as well as the transmission of messages between them. The success of the pedagogical act is largely conditioned by the success of the communication act. The conduct of teaching activities in the past two years in which, globally, humanity has been facing the coronavirus pandemic, has undergone changes imposed by the need to replace or supplement the classic educational action of face-to-face teaching through online teaching activities.

The problem we submit for analysis is the effectiveness of didactic communication carried out in the conditions of instructive-educational activities in the online environment, reflected in aspects such as: teacher-student interaction, feedback, and educational message. Following a semi-structured interview applied to groups of first- and second-year students, we devised the items of a questionnaire through which we aimed to identify the students’ perception of the effectiveness of didactic communication in the context of online instructive-educational activities. The aim of the investigation was to identify the extent to which the elements that ensure the premises of effective didactic communication are also found at the level of instructive-educational activities carried out in the online environment. The students' answers highlight their observation that, in the online teaching activities, the didactic communication between teachers and students takes place within certain limits: the nonverbal communication cannot be present or visible most of the time; the transmission of messages from teacher to student predominates to the detriment of teacher-student and student-student communication, interactions. The changes that occur in didactic communication within the context of teaching activities conducted online are natural consequences of the specificity of this manner of carrying out instructive-educational activities.