Pandemic-induced Migration From Campus to Digital Mode: Experiences From Social Work Students and Teachers in India and Sweden

Abstract

The article explores the rapid COVID-19 pandemic-induced migration from campus to digital modes of education in 2020–2021. The process of this migration offers an opportunity to examine some important issues related to digital teaching, learning, and education during the pandemic. Based on our study of the School of Social Work at Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India, and the School of Social Work at Lund University, Sweden, we explore and compare the social component in the experiences of students and teachers at the two institutions. The data collection draws on focus group sessions and interviews complemented by various relevant institutional documents and our own experiences at our respective institutions. The core argument we put forth in the article is that the Swedish student and teacher response to the pandemic-induced crisis and the migration to digital classes was a case of ‘trusting the state’, as they were passively waiting for top-down initiatives and instructions. On the other hand, the response at the Indian institution was a case of ‘trusting ourselves’, not waiting for top-down instructions and support but creating bottom-up solutions within the internal community of teachers and students. We also highlight the different perceptions and the impact of teaching and studying from home on physical and emotional levels. While we present the differences and specificity around the expectations of teachers and students at the two institutions, we also elucidate their patience, perseverance and innovation while engaging with the realities of work and studying from home while being kept away from campus.

Introduction

The abrupt outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic and its extensive spread caught the world largely unprepared and has had severe consequences on most walks of life. While the public health consequences of the pandemic were most pronounced, it fundamentally affected even education, livelihood and other aspects of human life and circumstances (Pawar, 2020; Sengupta & Jha, 2020). Since COVID-19 was extremely contagious, most countries announced lockdowns and severely restricted human interaction through ‘stringent interventions such as sanitisation, wearing masks, using hand gels, and social distancing measures’ (Babbar & Gupta, 2022, p. 470; Upoalkpajor & Upoalkpajor, 2020). While all sectors bore the brunt of the widespread pandemic, the education sector specifically experienced immense turmoil during COVID-19 (Paudel, 2021). The lockdown and associated restrictions forced educational institutions to shut down, affecting 1.57 billion students globally (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, 2021). Bryant and Williams (2020) highlight that though space is a relational concept which includes ‘very recognisable geographies of daily movement, which may be local, regional or global’, referring to Smith and Low (2006, p. 3), they also include electronic and institutional spaces. When educational institutions across the globe proceeded to suspend in-person, campus-based classes and shifted to digital platforms of education, there was a general transformation of place and space that affected the sensory experiences as well as shifting relationships of belonging/identity and attachment within the community of students and staff (Jack, 2010).

To keep functioning and continuing with teaching-learning, educational institutions were migrating to digital learning platforms for which some countries and institutions were better prepared than others (Babbar & Gupta, 2022). Conventional teaching methods were replaced by newer and more non-conventional modes of digital teaching and assessment taking place on various digital learning platforms such as Zoom, WebEx, Microsoft Teams and others (Azman et al., 2021). A survey by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on educational situations due to COVID-19 in 98 countries showed that ‘the availability of technological infrastructure, addressing student emotional health, addressing the right balance between digital and screen free activities and managing the technological infrastructure’ posed major challenges in most countries (Reimers & Schleicher, 2020, p. 17). Digital education was a ‘pedagogical shift from traditional method to the modern approach of teaching-learning, from classroom to Zoom, from personal to virtual and from seminars to webinars’ (Mishra et al., 2020). Several studies like the ones included in Pinheiro et al. (2023) show that even if the challenge was global, macro-level responses differed considerably from the responses of individual institutions. The embarkation on a contingent plan of digital teaching and learning had varied experiences within and across the country context. While digital penetration and infrastructure were crucial, the experiences and wherewithal to deal with the unanticipated and unexplored terrain of digital education turned out to be a genuine everyday concern for students and teachers, educational institutions, governments and civil society organisations (Kummitha et al., 2021).

While technologically advanced nations claimed to have swiftly migrated to digital platforms, developing countries and populous nations had to struggle and kept shifting their strategies and approaches to digital and hybrid teaching (Mathrani et al., 2022). However, with a digital infrastructure already in place and maybe also because of previous experiences with digital learning platforms, it was still possible for the faculty to continue teaching and for the students to continue their learning process (Pillay et al., 2023, p. 419). But irrespective of the existing educational resources, virtual platforms, digital infrastructure and familiarity with technology, many students and teachers across the globe had to struggle to adapt to the sudden and unanticipated shift. Despite various infrastructural limitations, educational institutions experimented with innovative modes of education such as blended mode learning, hybrid courses, and synchronous and asynchronous teaching methods (Sutton & Jorge, 2020).

In an attempt to understand the social component in the transformation of space in the migration from campus to digital among students and teachers as well as in the pedagogies, this article explores and compares the School of Social Work at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in India and the School of Social Work at Lund University (LU) in Sweden. It is against this backdrop that the objective of the research is to engage with academic-administrative and pedagogical perspectives to bring out the social component in the learning process of social work students. The article also analyses the experiences of students and teachers in adapting to new situations. We engage with the research question of capturing subjective experiences of migration from campus to digital and the experiential aspect of the adaptation process.

Conceptual Framework

The social component of space and place in our study is inextricably interwoven with the concept of social trust and the distinction between ‘trusting the state’ and ‘trusting each other’. ‘Trusting the state’ means trusting top-down institutional actors to deal with one’s problems and develop durable and pragmatic solutions. In this case, the educational institutions include governments’ directives and facilitation in general and the specific arrangements and systems put in place by the universities, in particular. ‘Trusting each other’ is a situation when there is no expectation of any top-down support from external actors but is about relying on the affected community mobilising to find solutions (Sønderskov & Dinesen, 2016). For instance, reflecting on how students felt at the School of Social Work at LU, Montesino and Söderman’s (2021) examination of social work students’ lives without access to campus indicates mixed feelings of anxiety, worries and sadness on the one hand and, on the other hand, an idealistic hope for humankind in terms of a palpable sense of solidarity they perceive between people both locally and globally. A similar sense of solidarity amidst a complex realm of uncertainty and anxiety was observed and shared by the students and faculty at TISS.

Both social and political trust hinge on the dynamic relationship between those who govern and those who are governed and the quality of the relationship between the state and the citizen. The question of how trust matters and how it influences transition decisions in a crisis or complex situation provides ideas about societal responses. As a concept, social trust is a phenomenon at play in the interaction between the individual and anonymous others. A basic proposition is that prosocial behaviour enables cooperation for the common good. It has been supported by many studies, some of the most well-known being Putnam et al.’s (1993) study of Italian civil society where the authors conclude that participation in voluntary organisations builds social trust through repeated interaction between individuals, and Putnam’s (2000) study of the decreasing social interaction, and civic engagement in the United States and its negative effect on the democracy since the 1950s. Building on a range of research studies, Levi and Stoker (2000, p. 481) argue that whether citizens express trust or distrust is primarily a reflection of their political lives, not their personalities not even their social characteristics. Trust has a ‘double-edged quality’ (Devine et al., 2021), it can either make people too dependent on institutions or set in complacency impacting their well-being. It is crucial to comprehend how the pandemic has impacted trust in the process of implementation of decisions and compliance with instructions. The dynamic nature of trust has the potential to help one understand the behaviour and response of the citizens.

Social trust theory also makes distinctions between social trust and institutional trust and between cultural and experiential social trust. While social trust is a kind of basic sociological concept as defined in the above paragraph, some studies distinguish between the cultural roots and the experiential roots of social trust (Delhev & Newton 2010; Kumove, 2024). Briefly put, the former perceives social trust as something we learn during childhood and which is immune to experiences later in life while the latter perceives social trust as something that is gained by experience in the line of Putnam’s argument about participation in civil society. Institutional social trust, on the other hand, emerges from peoples’ ‘perception of the fairness and effectiveness of state institutions’ (Sønderskov & Dinesen, 2016, p. 181).

Methodology and Processes

The Schools of Social Work at LU and TISS were purposively chosen as they maintain a long-time partnership, exchanging students, teachers and staff members and conduct research together. Both schools struggled hard to adapt during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially with the initial rapid migration from campus to digital teaching. Although the School of Social Work in Lund is part of a conventional university with different disciplines of education while the school of social work is part of TISS which is mainly a social science institute, they are both dedicated to social work education and research, and it is in this limited context we have compared our mutual experiences.

The design of the study is on the inductive side of qualitative research with a phenomenological approach to the participants’ experiences. Both primary and secondary data were collected for the study. The population for this study was social work students and teachers at TISS Mumbai and LU. By following the convenience sampling method, a total of 30 students and eight faculty members participated in the research data collection process. We have included students across ages, genders, socio-economic circumstances, geographical diversity and work backgrounds. The data collection method was primarily focus group sessions and interviews with students and teachers. Separate focus groups for the student and teacher groups were conducted, mainly to make it easier for the participants to speak freely if they were in a group of peers. Some focus groups and interviews were carried out face to face and some as video group/individual chats online. In the focus groups, the discussion thematically and chronologically traced the participants’ experiences of the migration from campus to digital in terms of its impact on their learning/teaching as well as their life and social interaction in general, and exploring issues related to information, restrictions, regulations, learning platforms, the digital divide and so on, encouraging them to share and compare personal examples between each other. The recordings were then transcribed and thematically coded and analysed.

In addition, we, the authors, analysed secondary data such as policies, institutional reports, circulars, government notifications and academic directives during the pandemic. Due to our previous experience with digital teaching-learning platforms and processes, we also anchored and assisted faculty members and course coordinators during the migration from campus to digital. The notes of such interaction were also utilised. Prior permission for the study was already secured from both institutions, and as per research ethics requirements, consent was taken from all research participants.

While writing this article, we are conscious of certain limitations of the study. As the sample size was small, we comprehend that the experiences and perspectives shared by the participants may not fully reflect the diversity of experiences within the larger student and faculty body. Since the participants come from only two specific social work departments, the findings may not be generalisable to other academic disciplines and different universities in countries with varying infrastructural and institutional support for digital learning. Cultural and institutional differences between Sweden and India may also impact the transferability of the findings to other contexts. These constraints on generalisability underscore the need for further research across diverse contexts and over longer timeframes to make broader conclusions about the implications of digital learning during a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pandemic and Initial Brush with Policy and Practices

What enfolded at both institutions was not only a struggle to adapt to a digital mode, but it also had far and wide consequences in the everyday interaction and engagement within the community of students and teachers. The external environment, family circumstances and digital learning platforms were not always conducive for everyone. Many students had constrained resources and belonged to less tech-savvy families. They also suffered because of the costs associated with buying digital devices and subscribing to internet data plans.

Issues of timing and technostress have been witnessed in studies of Swedish universities (Svedmark et al., 2021) and by the numerous post-pandemic student papers written about studying under COVID-19. As was clear from our comparison, the timing had a decisive impact on the situation for both institutions. In comparison to the School of Social Work in Lund, which was caught by the pandemic during mid-semester, had to adjust overnight and continue until the beginning of June, the School of Social Work at TISS could manage to survive for just a few weeks left until the end of the semester and then deal with the situation in a less stressful manner. The first verified COVID-19 case among students in Lund was detected in mid-March, 2020, about the same time as the central directive for the closure of universities in India was declared. The social work teachers in Lund were given a week’s notice to migrate their classes to a digital learning platform called Canvas. There was a strong and rather impressive initial mobilisation working from the premise that everything would be back to normal by the start of summer. But the pandemic dragged on. There were positive and negative consequences for everyone. With a digital infrastructure already in place and maybe also because of previous experiences with digital learning platforms, it was still possible to continue functioning and for teachers to continue teaching and students to continue their learning process (Pillay et al., 2023, p. 419).

The Swedish Experience

A Swedish meta-study of student experiences of higher education during the pandemic (Hernwall et al., 2022) highlights three challenges: awareness of what it means to be a student, technology framed communication and the need for explicit guidance. Whereas the third challenge was not evident in our data, most of our participants commented on the other two. Being alone at home, away from campus was hard for students who identified their studies with university space. Without the physical social mingling and company of other students, the small talk, the coffee shops, libraries and working spaces, they did not feel like university students and the digital learning platforms did not provide any specific structure for social interaction (Espersson et al., 2023). To be forced to stay at home, not being able to participate physically on campus and experiencing technical and social problems when attempting to study online suggested negative effects on their education (Pinheiro et al., 2023). Another Swedish study of social relations in remote work in Sweden during the pandemic concluded that, in general, remote workers most often did not include responsibility for social relations in their duties and were not particularly engaged in keeping them up (Espersson et al., 2023). This was the case among teachers and students at the School of Social Work in Lund and, to a lesser extent, at the School of Social Work at TISS. Most students participating in our study faced problems related to a loss of self-discipline and motivation in their studies. They felt isolated at home but did not really make an effort to break out of their loneliness, and when migrating their classes to a digital learning platform, the teachers had not included any designs for social interaction. In fact, they did not even think about it and took it for granted.

Few students at the School of Social Work in Lund experienced technical problems, ‘we had access to everything’ a student told us. Studying from home included positive as well as negative experiences for her. It was a comfortable but trying time.

I remember that I heard that universities in different parts of the world were shutting down and making it online. I remember that I was waiting for my university to do that. Maybe it was because of my laziness since it takes an hour and a half for me to get there. The thought of staying at home and having lectures and seminars online was comforting for me.

Another student in Lund who was living alone in an apartment told us that she was

pretty much just studying from home. A lot of time was spent in the specific space in my home I had to adapt it and make it a studying space when I was studying. But then, when I was done studying for the day, I had to put the books away so that they were not visible, so I could relax.

I became too comfortable in my comfort zone. I quit my job and was at home all the time. When we went back to being on campus, I had to force myself to get a job again and get out of my house. In the beginning, there was anxiety to be out there in the bus and train.

It was difficult to communicate in an organisation under constant uncertainty about the future. On the positive side was the innovation of new and creative digital and hybrid solutions in teaching methods. In the fall semester of 2020, some of the classes started with small in real life group meetings on campus in the belief that it would make digital classes work better. But some students were too afraid of the virus to show up and there is no evidence that this strategy worked better than starting digital. For the social work teachers in Lund, the migration from campus to Canvas was unexpected and rapid. They were unprepared and more or less had to crash into it. For many, it was their first encounter with Canvas. There was hardly any support from the university except for some self-study film clips. In practice, much of the instructions and coaching were provided informally by a few ‘superusers’ among a couple of colleagues who had previous experience with Canvas. Teachers testified about various feelings of stress and anxiety as well as uncertainty about how to manage Canvas and rebuild their courses in a digital format. However, there were no forthcoming directions about a common Canvas interface. To continue with their classes, a number of the teachers tried to recreate their campus course to digital with as few changes as possible. They saw it as a temporary short-term problem requiring a quick fix and did not want to spend too much time learning about it. Looking back, most of them realised that they had underestimated the difficulties and complexity of teaching a class on a digital learning platform.

Reminiscing the experience, a teacher said: ‘When I was migrating my course to Canvas, trying to sort it out, I felt very unsure about how the communication with students would work. It was excruciating. I had to teach myself and I wanted to know what would work in digital pedagogics.’

The teachers were confused and unsure about choices between different tools on the platform and hence were trying out different modes, leading to multiple channels of communication with students.

Every morning my mailbox would be full of messages asking what was going on. Students and other teachers asked me questions that I didn’t know how to answer. I just wanted someone to confirm to me that what I was trying to do was the correct way to do it. I felt very lonely.

The Indian Experience

Several studies like the ones included in Pinheiro et al. (2023) show that even if the pandemic posed significant challenges to higher education across the world, the macro-level responses often differed considerably from the responses of individual institutions. Contrary to the general situation in India and global evidence showing that most teachers were not well acquainted with different modes and platforms of digital teaching and lacked the technical know-how necessary for digital teaching and digital content creation (Babbar & Gupta, 2022), the situation at TISS was slightly different. Building on their earlier familiarity with some aspects of digital interface, students and teachers found time to gradually adapt to the changes due to the pandemic-induced lockdown and closure of the campus space. The academic semester at TISS was at its end in March 2020 and the selection of a new batch of students was partially completed. The lockdown followed by semester break vacation was utilised by the university administration and faculty members to gradually plan, organise, and orient themselves to migrate to a digital learning platform amidst the pandemic. The transition was facilitated, technical staff provided the necessary support and administrative staff were trained to provide backup support. Several digital workshops were organised for faculty, staff, field supervisors and students. Faculty members were encouraged to build on their previous digital teaching experiences, work on digital course designs and plan for teaching on digital platforms. At a national level, central repositories of learning resources were made accessible to various stakeholders by establishing e-learning portals (Dawadi et al., 2020). Substantive investment in augmenting digital infrastructure was made and technical support was ensured by forming committees of faculty and staff with better digital know-how. For those who were finding it difficult to comprehend the migration, separate small group meetings were organised. Efforts were made to augment study materials and add new courses to the existing digital education portals such as SWAYAM, SWAYAM Prabha and the National Repository of Open Educational Resources (Dutta, 2020). This was supplemented by specific requirements of students and teachers at the institute level. The apex statutory body responsible for ensuring quality education in Higher Education Institutes in India, the University Grants Commission, got into action to promote digital education and sort out issues related to examinations and academic calendar (Roy & Brown, 2022). To deal with the unprecedented crisis, numerous other initiatives were launched to support digital education including a national digital library to serve as a repository of digital resources, so-called massive open online courses, direct-to-home television and YouTube channels (ibid.).

Institutionally, Zoom was identified as a preferred digital learning platform as it was easy to deal with instructional design while Moodle continued as an asynchronous platform. As the students and teachers were already familiar with Moodle, they could make better use of its varied features. There were variations in the individual teacher’s manner in using Zoom. Few followed the classroom lecture model and efforts were made to integrate video, webinars, tools like break-out rooms and so on.

The social work students at TISS come from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and many have limited digital access, some of them struggle a lot. As part of the admission process in 2020, a student who appeared for a panel interview on Zoom shared that the ‘Zoom platform was very new to me. I didn’t have proper internet at home, I had to shift places; appeared for an interview of one programme from one friend’s place and another from another friend’s place.’ Many students had to manage with their smartphone as they did not have laptops or personal computers. ‘Sometimes in the middle of class, the parents started calling or talking, making it awkward and complicated’, said another student. The size of the house, the number of family members sharing the accommodation and common space and sharing of limited digital devices available in the family had serious implications on students’ learning from home. The digital divides which can be concealed in person-to-person engagement became obvious and made it very challenging for critical pedagogies and student participation. The costs associated with digital devices and internet data plans were also serious concerns for many.

After realising the extent of the digital divide due to the lack of computers, TISS managed to source old and used laptops from some business houses, repaired them and had them couriered to students who did not have a personal computer. But due to an inferior quality and other reasons, many of these laptops were of limited use. Besides, owing to poor connectivity or lack of a data pack with sufficient bandwidth, some students were not able to download files, videos and so on. In this adverse situation, many participants relied on cooperation and support from peers who would download the material and send it through apps such as WhatsApp. They seemed to develop trust with peers and with the institute but found it difficult to cope with the excessive exposure to digital devices due to long hours and hectic academic schedules. This led to stress, anxiety and a lack of motivation. ‘Two years of digital education and having to sit in front of the screen for long was too stressful. My eyesight got affected and my mental health deteriorated’, a social work student at TISS told us. Adversely affected by digital constraints, many students either dropped out or took deferment from the academic programme. Those who moved from one to another year in a digital mode managed to deal with it better.

Comparing Experiences

Getting into a comparison of digital learning vis-à-vis campus learning, the students who came to the TISS campus in the 2nd year emphasised formal and informal peer learning, dialogue and discussions that complemented classroom teaching and facilitated critical thinking and cooperation. Many participants in our focus groups at TISS told us how they were exposed to numerous group activities and group assignments in the 2nd year which provided an opportunity to work with students from other specialisations. For us, it was insightful as we could get diverse perspectives from students of public health, criminology, Dalit and tribal studies, women-centred practice, community organisation and many more from the school of social work. Exposure was mostly missing in the digital mode. Echoing the sentiment, one student said: ‘While studying online I didn’t feel like being a TISS student, only after coming to campus did it sink in that I am a TISS student.’

Based on her engagement with TISS students in digital and campus teaching, Nigudkar (2020, p. 15) reiterates that ‘in a face-to-face classroom, opportunities for reflective learning, discussions/debates on complex social realities and the need for social change, knowing one another, practice sessions, and skill-building are easier vis-à-vis the online medium’. In the classroom set-up, students highlighted verbal and nonverbal communication and gestures, peer reaction and response energising. In contrast, in a digital mode of presentations, students used to keep the point ready and read it out from devices that were less spontaneous and engaging. Nigudkar (2020) endorses such experiences about digital teaching, ‘with a “stop video” option and microphones on “mute”, it is often difficult to ascertain student participation. It can also be challenging to understand classroom dynamics and the interpersonal relationships among peers beyond the classroom’. The so-called black box phenomenon was prevalent at both of the Schools of Social Work. As a participant shared:

I felt bad for the teachers when nobody had the camera on. There was a void of silence. They hoped that people were listening. I think that affected the feeling of it and also if there were pre-recorded videos you had to reach out yourself if there were no seminars connected to the video. Then they were just like, there was no interactive element.

As indicated in the quote, it was easy for students to skip digital classes and lectures or participate without paying attention to what was going on. People would just stay quiet, turning off their cameras and muting their microphones. Attempts by the teacher to promote student interaction with break-out rooms in Zoom often fell dead on the ground:

I would say some group work online was more awkward than group work on campus. In the break-out rooms, many students would leave the Zoom link as soon as the teacher would divide us into break-out rooms. They just didn’t want to be there. Sometimes no one turned on their microphones or cameras in the break-out rooms.

Echoing what the TISS student said, a student in Lund confirmed to us that some of the digital group work was more difficult than group work on campus: ‘People were just quiet. In the break-out rooms, many students would leave the Zoom link as soon as the teacher would divide the class into break-out rooms’.

Amidst the received wisdom and perception about the modalities of the teaching-learning and institutional support structure, the study revealed some ingenious ways to evolve mutual support and trust, care and handholding during complex and confusing times of pandemic and digital studies. Several social work students at TISS told us that despite the availability of group sharing and facilitation platforms/media, they preferred to connect individually with those they felt comfortable with. Rather than posting in class or other group platforms, they asked for and secured information and suggestions on a one-to-one basis. Despite the black box silence and low activity during digital lectures, the students at both schools found ways to interact with each other on social media, outside the official digital learning platform. It was a way for them to create some social interaction among the people in class. As one student shared with us:

the social interaction motivated me to be online for social interaction during the lectures, where I and my friends would write to each other: did you understand that? Are you going to be in the break-out room? The same small talks that we would have in-person we had it on Facebook or Snapchat.

Social media was also a place for peer learning: ‘I would reach out to student Facebook groups. Does anyone want to hang out and talk about what we have been learning and do some low intensity talk?’ ‘Students asked stuff like do you know where the link is? We created some Messenger groups; it was used a lot for group assignments. We didn’t delete the group; people could hang out and talk’. In the peer learning groups, the discipline seemed to have been better than during the lectures: ‘Everyone would be disciplined. Because I had some friends, we were studying together following the same schedule’. ‘We used Messenger for communication when we wanted to meet for group work, even before the pandemic. It became frequent during the lockdown period. People were trying different ways’. Though most students who joined the School of Social Work at TISS in 2020 had never met each other face to face, the participatory elements of teaching-learning helped them identify at least one or two peers for individual connections regarding course content, teaching material, assignments and presentations and also for familiarisation with institutional rules, regulations and deadlines. Most participants made special mention of the class representative (CR) and how she turned out to be a go-to person for various queries, information and facilitation. The CR went all the way beyond the expected/desired role. She turned out to become a conduit between the group of students, student-teachers, student-administrative staff and so on. As the students had never met peers, teachers and staff face to face, they were anxious about protocol, mandate and flow of communication. Few students found it onerous to deal with the flow of information and instructions coming from the university, the department, classes, course choice and registration, assignment details and deadlines and so on: ‘a friend of mine registered for a course under Choice Based Credit System, he didn’t know when the class had begun or ended. He didn’t attend a single session of that course because he was not in the WhatsApp or other information group’. Moreover, many of the student participants in our focus groups mentioned how digital teaching-learning had made them submissive and socially reserved, quite different from their original disposition. As a comparative contrast, a social work student participant from Lund felt it was more comforting for her to talk during webinars than being in the campus classroom. ‘On Zoom, everyone was visible through tiny boxes and there were not many eyes turning and looking at me. I knew others were hearing my voice, but many were probably on the phone and were not looking. It was not that much of pressure.’ She emphasised her missing out on social interaction in the digital learning process,

You cannot see a person’s body language. You may misinterpret their intentions and there is enough room for miscommunications to happen. People’s ways being a lot harsher, judging people for doing bad things. For example, if someone is not following all the lockdown restrictions, they may be socially shunned in certain circles, and it can be hard to move away from that.

The black box phenomenon and problems with free-riding, passive students in digital group assignments were managed by innovative ways of creating group norms and shared accountability. In some of its classes in Lund, group members were required to draw up group contracts. Though it is acknowledged that in group work different members may take up responsibilities based on their interests and competence, the work process is collaborative and well integrated. It is a collective effort where the final product is shared. Also, in the student’s future professional role as a social worker, empathy as well as low arousal and respectful treatment are required. Hence, the group contract included agreement about questions like how often should the group meet? What is required of members who cannot attend a meeting? Should the group define tasks for them and if so, is that OK? How should the group members give each other feedback? What should the group do if the group work does not work out as planned?

Place and Space of Digital Classes

The extraordinary disruption in education due to the pandemic, in a way, facilitated a reimaging of physical and digital spaces for learning-teaching. The reality of protracted stay-at-home away from the educational institution for which neither the students nor their families were prepared transformed the sense of home, workplace and educational space. Studies of the Indian situation reiterate the blurred boundaries between home and work, study and household responsibilities, health and illness issues, and lack of a quiet space and the implications for learning during the pandemic (Nigudkar, 2022, p. 14; Pokhrel & Chhetri 2021). Many social work students at TISS found staying with their family in a limited space for a long duration daunting and at times claustrophobic. As a focus group participant said: ‘It was too difficult to deal with lack of space at home. I had to walk 2–3 metres away from home to talk on the phone so that family members don’t eavesdrop.’ Students living in metropolitan cities mostly stayed in tiny flats that they shared with many family members stuck due to lockdown and other restrictions. Several of the student’s parents and neighbours were panic-stricken and hysterical about pandemic protocol. Many of the students had to devote substantive time to healthcare, domestic help and other household responsibilities that led to compromises with study requirements and learning processes. Reflecting on their digital learning experiences while studying from home, another student shared: ‘When you’re at home, your role as a daughter, your role as a student, everything gets muddled, and you have overburdening responsibilities. It is a continuous balance between personal life, care work and other responsibilities that you have.’ The blurred or merged boundary between home and campus and the feeling of being stuck at home with numerous responsibilities and limited resources became overwhelming for many.

On the other hand, sometimes the prolonged phase of learning and teaching digitally led to a sense of comfort and ease and students got used to the changed context. Ruminating on her experience, a social work student in Lund shared:

The challenge that I discovered within myself after we went back to campus was that I had become too comfortable in my comfort zone [at home]. I had quit my job and was at home all the time […] when we went back to campus, I had to force myself to get out of my house.

At campus, both in Lund and Mumbai, teachers are almost always accessible to students for any discussion and consultation which was difficult to replicate on a digital learning platform. However, the participating students told us that their teachers felt obliged to respond to their communication through emails, messaging apps and platforms that they were using. After some time, the students in Lund realised that the teachers were more accessible digitally than they had been on campus. Much of the teacher’s time was spent designing the curriculum to make it suitable for the digital learning platform, preparing for asynchronous classes, as well as connecting with students, meeting with them in small groups or individually in break-out rooms or other platforms, and connecting with them through WhatsApp groups. In Lund, students told us about innovative and diverse responses by their teachers in the form of digital pedagogics. ‘Some teachers would have themselves recorded. Some were in the corner of the PowerPoint. Few used digital notes and voice-over. Many others delivered live lectures where the teacher would share a PowerPoint on the screen.’

Teachers at both institutions acknowledged the fact that, initially, they could not fully comprehend the fundamental differences between campus pedagogy and digital pedagogy. And as mentioned above, some teachers did not realise that the communicative and interactive sides of digital classes had to be designed appropriately; they do not happen naturally and cannot be replicated in the same format as campus classes. There were large variations in quality between classes, something that did not go unnoticed among students. But as the pandemic continued, the teachers were gradually learning how to work the platforms’ interface and how to design a functional digital learning environment. When restrictions were finally lifted, the forced digital experience had given the teachers some good experiences and new skills and a readiness to include more digital and hybrid elements in their campus classes.

Reflecting on the modalities of digital learning, Stewart et al. (2011) highlight how synchronous digital classes or real-time engagement between teacher and students increase the scope of interaction and proximate a face-to-face classroom. However, this was not corroborated by those students who had migrated to digital learning platforms during the pandemic. The concerns about attention span, the situation at home, demands of multitasking and simultaneous activities at home were flagged by most of our participants. The teachers structured digital delivery by customising sessions into smaller units and contents were organised into smaller segments: classroom inputs, weblinks, excerpts, handouts, video and PPTs upload, reference material for additional reading and self-study and separate time for online discussion and doubt clarification.

Familiarised with the more predominant and conventional campus lecture format, collaborative learning and active class participation in digital classes was a new experience for most social work students at TISS. The use of participatory methods by the teachers increased peer interactions and discussions, as the students reported how they felt more confident about themselves. The social work students in Lund felt that it became easier to get a Zoom link from the teacher and talk to them there rather than finding a date and time to meet on campus. However, reflecting on campus versus digital, a student in Lund said:

It became easier to send an email and get a link back [but] there is something about seeing somebody in a window and then seeing somebody in-person. You don’t just see the teacher you see the background, sometimes you hear the voices of their kids. They can’t control it, but it does affect the experience in some ways [moreover] it was interesting to see how they lived. What books they have, and what pictures are hanging on the wall … overall, how they live.

Discussion and Conclusion

Albeit small and limited, our study distinguishes quite clearly between the respective experiences of teachers and students in the two schools where the School of Social Work in Lund was characterised more by trust in the state to manage the pandemic crisis top-down while the teachers and students at the School of Social Work at TISS were more bound to trust themselves to manage it bottom up.

While the crisis took the educational institutions completely off-guard, the teaching and learning experiences were shaped by their level of preparedness, political will and responsiveness. While the study intended to engage with the campus and digital infrastructure and experiences around migration from one to another, the findings bring forth the vital importance of how space is being perceived and experienced in teaching-learning. While students appreciated the potential of digital learning platforms, the idea and issues associated with home as space turned out to be a crucial component in the Indian context. It was the physical environment, the social construction around home and family/extended family and the alien idea of studying from home that ultimately influenced how the students related to and discounted digital learning. The sudden and largely unprepared digital migration while having to stay put in a family home environment had implications on their nature and behaviour as many of them felt that they became submissive and inhibited. In a situation where the student’s space was more exclusive, as was the case in Lund, attending digital classes during the pandemic was comforting.

Judging by the live realities shared with us during the study, most people in Sweden seemed to have trusted governance institutions, waiting for a higher authority to issue top-down instructions and provide the necessary support. The Indian teachers and students – not expecting any top-down instructions soon – joined together in a common search for practical bottom-up solutions. After some time, specific arrangements were made by the Indian higher education authorities which supplemented the bottom-up solutions. On the other hand, the social consequences, even the life-changing ones for the Indian students, were in some cases drastic and went much further and deeper in comparison to the Swedish students. It can perhaps be conceived as another form of trusting ourselves, in this case, the family, to try and sort things out at home. While their experiences of additional responsibility, constraints of space at home and limited means to adapt to the demands of appropriate digital technology were obvious, the social work students at TISS navigated many impediments through peer support, mutual trust and proactive support from the teachers and the university. While the preference for campus teaching and learning was considered dynamic and inclusive, students also realised the huge potential and convenience of a digital mode, particularly for those who had to manage jobs and families.

Looking specifically at social trust in Sweden during the pandemic, Bengtsson and Brommesson (2021) found weak levels of individual trust and high levels of institutional trust. When comparing with previous studies of social trust in Sweden during stable times, we could not find levels significantly different from those under the COVID-19 crisis. The findings indicate a society where people generally trust the state rather than trusting each other, and we find this distinction to be reflected in our comparison between the two school’s responses to the pandemic. In their study about the roots of trust in local governments in Western Europe, Fitzgerald and Wolak (2016) refer to Sweden as a centralised state where citizens are generally positive about the design and performance of the government and the welfare state. We talk about high ‘political trust’, a concept similar to ‘institutional trust’ (ibid., p 132).

Based on our comparison of the experiences of students and teachers looking back at the migration from campus to digital modes of teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic-induced crisis, the challenges as well as opportunities were discernible. A challenge in the Indian setting was the digital divide and the inequalities caused by the students’ limited access to personal learning space at home, appropriate devices such as laptops and off-campus internet connectivity. This is in stark contrast to the experience of the Swedish students where the digital mode was not so much a source of obstacles but rather contributed to a more or less glitch-free migration to digital classes without any disruption, increased flexibility in comparison to campus classes and opportunities of so-called self-paced learning. However, studying from home, Swedish and Indian students shared feelings of isolation and a loss of motivation, leading to stress anxiety and concerns for mental and physical well-being. Some Indian students who were forced to stay back with their families were also troubled by the lack of an undisturbed space for studying as well as obligations of responsibilities and obligations at home. Looking at the experiences of the teachers, they shared the same stress and anxiety with the students. In this case, these feelings were caused by an unfamiliarity with the learning platform and a lack of instructions and support during the rapid migration of their classes from campus to digital. Social work educators were anxious to keep the teaching-learning participatory and interactive which was difficult in digital mode. However, some of the faculty members echoed that ‘COVID-19 sparked opportunities for innovation, creativity, and humanistic endeavours in meetings the needs of the students and moving forward in delivering social work education remotely and virtually’ (Mclaughlin et al., 2020, p. 975). In our analysis, we highlight how variations in social trust in India and Sweden affected the teachers’ responses and how the Indian teachers’ ‘trusting themselves’ pragmatically faced the challenge in community with the students while the Swedish teachers’ ‘trusting the state’ was a major source of their anxiety. Overall, our comparison shows that it not only offered opportunities for both continuity and innovation during the pandemic but also exposed some of the existing constraints and inequalities that must be addressed in the future.