The negative impacts of student use of online tools during emergency remote teaching and learning on teacher-student relationships.

Abstract

This article focuses on the importance of establishing and maintaining relationships between teachers and students for the mutual benefit of both groups and explores this in one context during the Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning (ERTL) period in the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in 2020. Ten instructors of university English as a foreign language (EFL) academic writing were interviewed about their experiences during this period. All questioned the academic honesty and ethics of their students due to what seemed to be their impossibly rapid progress in linguistic complexity and correctness, and the depth of ideas expressed growing very quickly. Due to communication between teachers and students being limited to text-based messages on the Learning Management System, teachers were unable to investigate without potentially causing university disciplinary action to fall on their students. This led to a worsening of relationships and spiraling levels of distrust. Forty first-year students were then asked to submit three-minute videos explaining how they undertook their homework assignments during the 15-week semester. Participants reported using a variety of technological assistance, particularly Machine Translation (MT) and online grammar checkers, to prepare assignments for submission. Findings suggest that educating instructors about how appropriate usage of such technology can benefit student learning could help prevent misunderstandings about unethical technology usage. Similarly, by recognizing the value of the relationship between instructors and students, time can be spent on building and fostering these bonds.