Connecting to your students
Creating and maintaining a trustful atmosphere in your class
Humans are social beings. As such, we all have the need to feel part of a group. This experience of relatedness is conducive to learning because it fosters intrinsic motivation. But how can we help students to experience relatedness in time of remote teaching?
The pandemic has forced ETH students to adapt to a completely different study routine. In the middle of the Autumn Semester, they had to switch back to online teaching yet again. So how are they coping? In response to concerns about student mental health, an ad hoc survey was conducted in December of last year. The results in a nutshell: students feel they have good support, but the pandemic is still taking a heavy toll on their well- being (more info about the ad hoc-survey the link below). Among other things, the survey revealed how important and supportive a good learning atmosphere and cohesion within the class are.
Connecting to your students - Panel dicussion
Although we did not ask for it in the survey, some students voluntarily shared examples of instructors with whom they had particularly positive learning experiences in distance learning or who created a particularly good atmosphere. Most of these were not mentioned by name, but some were.
Five of them will share and dicuss their ways of building a relationship with their students despite the lack of personal contact.