Results of the survey carried out by the EEBIII students on their e-learning experience

(General remarks based on the the feedback of EEBIII students about their e-learning experience)

Regarding physical and mental health:

• Students are moving less, staying more at home. This means their physical health slowly deteriorates. Students are acting on this by going in parcs to run and cycle. 
• Students are staying longer in front of screens.  Some complain of frequent headaches and tiredness. They also complain of tiredness of the eye and fear a loss of quality of their eyesight.
• Students sleep longer. This is clearly a positive, students pointed this out. Because they don’t have to physically come to school, especially those that live far outside of Brussels can sleep much longer. 
• The lack of interaction with friends between hours and in brakes is also affecting students. They only see their family and their screens.

Most of the complaints are that they move less and have headaches due to the long screen times. We can note though that many students see their health improve as they get more sleep than they usually get. Overall, the results here are what we expected. Improvements need to be made to ensure that students do enough sport. Our suggestion a daily PE plan from the PE teachers rather than regular classes. Students normal sport activities have been cancelled. They need an alternative and we are uniquely positioned to provide a quality replacement. Most student would greatly benefit from this.

Regarding the workload and quality of lessons:

• Students see their workload increase a lot. This is overall the n°1 complaint of students. They see themselves having double the workload than usual in some rare cases, but almost all are seeing their workload increase significantly. 
• Students also complain that teachers are giving less explanations for their exercises. 
• Students miss the visual support of a board. This is noted in infrastructure as well, but it is critical that this is tackled as it is the most stated explanation on why students are learning less.
• 50% of students are saying that the quality of their classes has been negatively affected, 40% say as good and 10% as better. This is expected but this is still a working progress, so it is normal.

Students are overall positively impressed by the quality as many expected a terrible experience. But it must also be said that 75% of the students reported to learn less in online schooling. Being in conversation with many of them leads us to the conclusion that a main reason for that is the lack of a visual support in the lessons. Sharing screens would help a lot and it is not requiring any costly upgrades. It must also be noted that we are, following Munich’s experience, seeing an increase in the overall workload of the students. Some are suffering from this mentally and have stated in the survey that their anxiety increased. This is alarming and we would recommend a level of assignments and homework that is mirroring what students are experiencing in “normal” school.  This is an issue that needs to be tackled with some urgency to reduce the stress of the students.

Regarding infrastructure:

• Some teachers have terrible microphones. This makes it hard for students to understand what the teacher is saying and therefore greatly deteriorates the quality of the teaching.
• Students want a replacement to the class boards to have a support of which they can read.
• Some students are abusing of a function on teams that lets them kick out people of the call or mute students and teachers. Teachers need a way of ensuring this does not happen and a way to mute the entire class to get some discipline in the call.
• Students raise the importance of a common place to put assignments and homework. All teachers have different approaches, and this is confusing if you have 10, 12 different classes and ways. Students suggest "assignments" on TEAMS. But to agree on only one place.
• Students also want clarity on where to put the done assignments. We suggest the class notebook. Every student has their own subsegment that the teacher can see what is posted. There is already a folder called “Homework”.
• 80% of students have perfect or good enough connections. This means though that 20% have bad ones.
• Students are also annoyed by some teachers sending PDF documents. This means that they are unable to work directly on the document and must copy what they need manually onto a word document. This is inefficient and time consuming. 

In all students agree that the teachers use the online tools well enough (78%). But there is still a need for more control over the call for teachers. Students want a clearer and common handling of the tools on teams. They do not want single ways from the teachers but a school policy, no one wants to have to search for the assignment and check where to put it once it is done. We also suggest teacher use more interactive tools. They can share their screens to replace the class board or go over documents. This is in line with the need of a visual support, this way it is easier to follow the lesson. Overall, the internet infrastructure is better than expected and there is not much disruption in classes. Only 2% reported so terrible connections that they are severely impacted by it.