Impact of COVID-19: the importance of supporting our students' well-being and emotions to improve their motivation towards remote learning

Abstract

[eng] Emotions are essential elements in our lives. As social beings as we are, we think, we feel, we perceive and at the same time we want to express our thoughts, ideas, emotions, feelings and perceptions, mainly because we want to share them with other people (Ozanska-Ponikw, 2012). Treating emotions and feelings in the classroom has recently became important among researchers. Studying the feelings experienced by students, play an important role in understanding students’ motivation, learning, performance, identity development, health as well as effective teaching (Meyer and Turner, 2006; Pekrun et al., 2011; Schutz and Pekrun, 2007). Unfortunately, in many schools sometimes this is not really considered. Furthermore, after the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis, this is even becoming a more complicated task. Amid this context of uncertainty, the 2020–2021 academic year has adopted several measures such as online learning for a return to the classroom. Although many countries have introduced different platforms for distance learning, this solution has not been very successful—not only because many families do not have access to the Internet or to a computer, but also because many teachers are encountering the difficulty of developing highquality online teaching (Mirahmadizadeh et al., 2020). The shift to remote learning/teaching is very complicated since teachers have to find a way to be connected with their students while also maintaining a work-motivation balance. This Master thesis focuses on the importance of taking care of the emotions of our students with the aim to stir up motivation and enthusiasm while remote learning. Despite the shift to remote learning as well as keeping our students’ motivation is a challenging one (Mirahmadizadeh et al., 2020); this thesis speculates that supporting and taking care of our students’ emotions thereby building a sense of security, empathy and a strong relationship between student and teacher, might boost interest and motivation towards remote learning.