Keyword – distance learning

Rajnai, Richárd – Németh, Szilvia:

Digital media use in schools – during a pandemic

The toughest recent challenge for the Hungarian public education system was the introduction of online education in March 2020. Pupils, teachers and parents had to leave the school’s usual classroom-based institutional framework without any preparation, and to rethink the whole process of learning/teaching in cyberspace, using the available—and often quite contingent—set of digital tools. Three months of online education offers a large-scale experiment with many lessons on how to reorganise the teaching/learning process in the digital space, how the roles of teachers, parents and students are changing, and how the communication between the actors of public education is changing. This paper, based on an empirical research on the online presence and internet use patterns among children aged 13–17, and using the methodology of the international standard EU Kids Online and Global Kids Online surveys, attempts to explore these issues. It focuses on the new educational/ media use situation created by digital education, and makes an attempt to observe and interpret the everyday practice of online education at the micro level.

Keywords: changes in parental and teacher roles, digital education, distance learning, educational platforms, focus group discussions, teacher/student communication, time spent online