Teacher-Student Communication with ICT

Materials and Methods

This investigation was implemented with the aim of obtaining answers to the above-mentioned research questions. For this purpose, a survey approach was adopted, with the data obtained being of a quantitative nature. Based on the model of analysis already described, an original questionnaire was designed to be answered by students and teachers at the University of Aveiro (Portugal). The structure and questions were similar for students and teachers and were directly aligned with the indicators of the model of analysis.

The answers to the first 4 questions of the questionnaire collected data about the participants regarding the indicators of students and teachers: gender, age, cycle of studies (in the case of students), or the main scientific area of teaching (in the case of teachers), and their department of affiliation.

The other 8 questions (questions 5 to question 12) referred to the purposes, functions, and expectations of students and teachers in the use of communication technologies to communicate. These questions aligned with the dimensions and indicators of the model of analysis, and the responses obtained from students and teachers allowed us to characterize the indicators of which communication technologies were used (question 5); the usefulness of their use (question 6); the ease of use (question 7); the attitudes towards their use, in terms of performance (question 8); intentions to continue use (question 9); current use of the system, in terms of the frequency of use (question 10); confirmation of usage expectations (question 11); and satisfaction in usage (question 12). The questions were originally written in Portuguese, but for better understanding, they are presented here in English (Section 3 Results). A dichotomous yes/no scale was used to answer question 5. Five-level Likert scales were used for questions 6–12. For each of these questions, a specific scale was used, and each of these scales is presented in detail in the tables where the results of each question are presented in the Results section.

The questionnaire was implemented online, and pre-tests were carried out with students and teachers to identify possible aspects of improvement, namely in the writing and presentation of the questions. The final version was available for participation between 22 March and 9 May 2018, and all students and teachers were invited to answer the questionnaire.

For the elaboration of questions 5 to 12, the communication technologies taxonomy presented in Table 2 was adopted. This taxonomy is an adaptation of previous versions elaborated by the same authors and used in other investigations and consists of six categories of communication technology. The first category is publishing and sharing technologies (PS), whose main function in the context of this study is the provision of pedagogical content and includes several examples of public platforms such as Youtube or Twitter, blogs in general, as well as institutionally available educational platforms such as Moodle or the Institutional platform (the name comes after the article review). The second category is collaborative technologies (CoT), designed to perform collaborative tasks involving students and/or teachers, and examples include Google Drive, Slack, or Wikis in general.

Table 2. Taxonomy of communication technologies.

The next three categories refer to interpersonal communication; however, they have different purposes. One category is electronic mail (EM), used for asynchronous one-to-one and one-to-many communication; it is provided to all students and teachers by their institution. In addition to the institutional email system, examples also include Gmail and Hotmail. Another category of interpersonal communication category is instant messaging (IM), mainly associated with a quick and often more informal communication tool, such as Messenger, WhatsApp, and SMS. The third category of interpersonal communication is videoconferencing and voice systems (VCS), such as Skype or Google Hangouts. At the time of this research, which predated the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom did not appear as an especially relevant example. Finally, the last category is social networks (SN), and examples include Sapo Campus, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The institutional platform includes features of social networks and is provided by the university.

Data were processed using descriptive statistical techniques. In addition, inference tests (t-tests) were performed to test the independence of the data samples of students and teachers, that is, to verify whether the differences found between the two samples were statistically significant. A significance level of α = 0.05 was adopted.