Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

Greetings! This is Arpit Das and welcome to my presentation on the topic, "Identifying the Social Skills Training Areas for Urban College Students during Online Learning in the Covid 19 Pandemic". I carried out this research for my PG Diploma Dissertation and would like to present an overview. As a student attending online classes during the pandemic, I had always felt a need to upgrade my skill sets via training to adjust and improve my classroom interaction and productivity effectively in these altered circumstances. Therefore, I found this topic relevant and worked on it. With this introduction, let me take you to the basic concepts. There are three basic concepts around which the research revolves. The first is the online mode of learning, in which the teachers and students meet on a common platform over the internet like zoom or google meet, for the exchange of Knowledge, Skills and Abilities. The pandemic has forced the education system to shift from offline to online classes, presenting a new situation for the academic circle. The second concept is Social Skills, which is defined by the Dictionary of Psychology as, "A set of learned abilities that enable an individual to interact competently and appropriately in a given context, in our case, it is online learning." Grover and colleagues have identified four categories: Communication skills, Emotion Regulation Skills, Social Cognitive Skills and Problem Solving Skills. Social Skills Training involves employing a set of activities which would promote the acquisition of such skills, enhancing performance, removing problem behaviours and facilitating pro-social behaviours. The final concept is Classroom Productivity which is the quantity or quality of output per number of inputs used on the students that lead to success in the learning objectives and is measured by student attention, engagement, curiosity, performance, etc. Keeping these concepts in mind, the following objectives were carved out for the research: (1)To understand whether online classes have been an appropriate substitute for offline classes in delivering the expected outcomes to the students. (2)To understand the efficiency of the tools and techniques employed in these methods in the perception of online learners. (3)To identify the necessary social skills among students and to detect their presence or lack thereof. (4)To understand the relationship between classroom productivity and social skills. (5)To find out the possible correlations between different sets of social skills. This brings us to the Research Methodology. The research problem is to understand and identify the need for social skills training in these novel circumstances and methods of learning for urban college students. The research hypotheses displayed before you have been drawn from relevant research questions. The research design was descriptive/non-experimental correlational research as it tends to have a high degree of external validity, that is, it can be generalised over a large population. Convenience sampling has been used to pick up respondents from an urban university. Primary Data has been collected by administrating the questionnaire approved by my mentor and the secondary data finds its source in reports, etc. Even though it has a wide scope of application in corporate as well as educational settings, it has its limitations in a small sample size restricted to urban settings and suffers from biases of the respondents. If the data is analysed in a nutshell, we find that around 53% of the students do not find the online mode of learning productive or effective for the learning process in comparison to offline learning. However, they are satisfied with the tools and techniques utilized currently for holding the classes online. This means there is a gap in the effective transfer and acquisition of knowledge, which is affected by several other factors. Talking of the social skills, except for communication skills, the students are below average in their emotional, cognitive and conflict-resolution skills. This makes them incapable to deal with challenges posed by online learning. This is corroborated by the fact that a significant majority of the students feel that classroom productivity, that is, success in achieving the objective of the classes, has dipped in the online mode of learning. It is further frustrated by the behavioural issues posed by the stakeholders. Finally, if we run the Pearson's Correlational Analysis, we find alpha is lower than 0.05, which means that all social skill sets have a significant correlation amongst themselves, always moderate and positive. This means an increase of one will also affect the increase of another, however, this needs more scrutinization. Thus, Hypotheses numbers 2-6 have been proven correct, while hypothesis 1 was not. This can be compressed into the given findings: (1) Online classes have not been a successful substitute for offline classes as per the perception and learning of the student respondents, even though the tools and techniques used are efficient in transferring the knowledge and skills required. (2)The urban students, due to their prior education, are good in their communication skills but fall short of the same competence in cognitive, emotional and problem-solving skills. This leads to the classes being inefficient and ineffective due to the absence of behavioural adjustment as per the contextual needs. (3)There is a positive, moderate correlation between the groups under social skills. This means that deficiency in one set will inadvertently affect the others, hence the respondents need to upgrade their skills for full and effective utilization of all their skills. (4)Classroom productivity in online classes is very low as per the data collected. This is a direct result of the behavioural incompetency of the students due to unfurnished social skills required for the given circumstances. (5) Almost 90% of the students feel that they require training for developing their social skills which would increase their classroom productivity in online settings. The following recommendations are suggested based on the findings: (1)Training in the areas of emotional intelligence, emotional well-being, conflict management, alternate dispute resolution, cognitive skills and relationship management are to be undertaken and evaluated at regular intervals till the relevant skills have not been internalised by the students in their everyday approach towards online and offline meetings. (2)The professors should be notified about the latest tools, applications and techniques that would make online learning interesting, engaging, impactful and personalised in order to positively skew the maximisation of learning as well as lasting retention of the Knowledge, Skills and Abilities. (3)The hybrid model should be adopted so that everyone keeps up with the latest technicalities and social skills, and be prepared for any unexpected turn of events in the future. The benefits of online as well as offline classrooms can be enjoyed to the fullest under this method. (4)Extensive research on Classroom Productivity and implementation of relevant strategies to amplify it should be undertaken by trainers. This would also succour in the contribution towards education and human resource development sector. Thank You for your kind audience! Have a nice day!