Reflections on Online Delivered Lessons, During COVID-19 Induced Restrictions, for Students of Informatics in a Vocational Lyceum of Greece

Abstract

During the pandemic outbreak of COVID-19, coinciding with school year 2019-2020, house confinement measures were taken throughout Greece. Conventional face-to-face schooling presented a threat to public health. As a result the Greek Ministry of Education proceeded to suspend school operations for a while and sponsor online lessons of various shapes and forms as a temporary measure soon after. The lessons, hastily designed to address extraordinary conditions and delivered in an ad hoc manner utilizing teachers’ personal experiences and preferences to fill a gap created by house confinement, created pressures on existing infrastructures on one hand, and a corpus of diverse experiences, contradicting evidence and on occasion reports on the other. A discussion on that corpus was inevitable and took part originally among teachers of the same school either unofficially or during sessions of the teachers associations of each school. The discussion should and will expand beyond that especially in reference to cases that constitute good practices or where data were collected. To this purpose, this paper presents the case of two theoretical lessons taught at senior high-school students of the Information Applications’ Technician specialty in a Vocational Lyceum. The lessons operated surprisingly well, in comparison to similar lessons, concerning student attendance, student engagement level and continuance. Some data were collected with a questionnaire and their processing later informed discussions during reflection plenary sessions of the online class. An attempt is made to explain the divergence from the general case and reflection on results is used to draw conclusions that may benefit further attempts.