Some psychological aspects of distant teaching

Abstract

The article presents a short review of works dealing with distant teaching problems and the results of students and lecturers’ survey at a higher educational institution about their attitude to distant teaching and psychological problems arising in the process of implementation. The experiment conducted reveals the major part of students and lecturers’ positive attitude towards the form of distant teaching which is being applied at the present period of time. As the main drawback of distance teaching, the surveyed students pointed out the lack of direct contact with a lecturer (45% of students who rated distance education in a negative way). The revealed important negative aspect of distance teaching is that some students began to spend more time getting ready for classes (21%). 55% of lectures are positive about distance education, and 45% are neutral. There are no people who rated in a negative way or very positive. Among those who gave a positive estimation of distance teaching, 33% of respondents, as well as students, indicate a high structure of educational material. Those lecturers, who have a satisfactory degree of distance teaching skills, but indicate that this work requires a lot of effort, turned out to be 90%.