At the end of the extended campaign, we conducted two surveys on the topic of distant learning and media literacy development for the 24 May, Bulgarian Education and Culture and Slavonic Literature Day – one with students and one with teachers. Thanks to the US Embassy grant we published and presented the results to journalists (via live-streamed conference) and the audience (via online and TV media) in June.
The parallel surveys highlighted both good practices within the lessons conducted remotely and some omissions related to the organization and nature of work. The results of the study among teachers show that a large number of educators do not make a direct connection between content creation and the ability to work with sources.
60% of teachers did not set a task related to finding and assessing the reliability of a source of information. Less than 1% set such every day after explaining to their students how to do that. Only 8% of all respondents conducted a lesson for this purpose; the same is the share of teachers that set the task of finding and verifying information sources every week. Every second teacher declares that he has not set his students the task of working in cooperation. Only 2% described situations related to fact-checking in the media in connection with the pandemic as examples of some task with information sources.
Approximately 70% of teachers gave a project task to assess students\’ knowledge and skills, with 40% stating that they set a task to create video content for the same purpose. One in seven respondents answered negatively to all questions related to assignment related to evaluating or creating content or working in a team.
Online learning through the use of various tools, working with media content and the ability to access and share information that the Internet provides, has the potential to contribute to the development of digital media literacy. An essential step for its implementation is to increase the qualification of teachers to work with ICT and media content. It is also necessary to adapt the learning process to the specific conditions for online communication in such a way that students and their teachers can interact fully and students develop skills to work both individually and collaboratively.
Surveys of students and teachers on distance learning in terms of the development of media literacy and analysis of their results were conducted with the support of the US Embassy\’s Small Grants Program.
Title Image: Freepik