VIRTUAL CLASSROOMS – SOME CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS
VIRTUAL CLASSROOMS – SOME CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS

Summary/Abstract: The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic has upset the traditional Romanian pattern for institutional education. When the government declared a state of emergency this spring and instituted a quarantine and restrictions in the entire country, subsequently only in some areas and then again in the whole country, schooling took a severe blow as pupils and students were no longer able to physically attend classes at their regular schools or universities. Most teachers, learners and even parents were forced to quickly update their methods of communication, to acquire smart devices as well as pertinent knowledge on how to work with said devices. This study focuses on some of the challenges encountered by its author when interacting with BA and MA students from ‘Carol I’ National Defence University in virtual classrooms and it also supplies some of the communication strategies which have proven useful in influencing participants to actively engage in activities, no matter if these were individual, pair or group tasks. Some communicative strategies which the author has employed as countermeasures in fighting students’ boredom during online classes come from the traditional face-to-face interaction between students and teachers. In this sense, questions have proven to be effective tools, whichever their type may be – rhetorical, action or discussion questions. A second strategy has been the activation and reactivation of Area 47 of the brain by stirring students’ curiosity and interest. Therefore, this paper initially presents the three types of questions with specific examples and results of their use in virtual classrooms and subsequently it looks into ways of activating Area 47 and the benefits thereof. To show their efficiency, a study was undertaken which is exploratory and discusses the data obtained from applying the abovementioned communicative strategies on 17 BA and 9 MA students over a period of six weeks.

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