33. Social Connectedness in Online Versus Face-to-Face Design Education: A Comparative Study in India

The global pandemic has affected almost every aspect of life across the globe including medical services, essential services, production units and educational institutes. People have been forced to physically and socially isolate themselves. This study focuses on the sudden shift that design schools in India had to make from having traditional face-to-face (F2F) classes to starting virtual classrooms online. This paper reports the results from semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with ten design tutors from ten different design schools across India. The authors attempt to understand how the design instructors compared the online classes with traditional F2F classes, and how they perceived the effects of instructor–student connectedness and interaction on teaching motivation and satisfaction in online design teaching. This study found that most instructors felt a lack of social connectedness with the students during the online classes. The paper discusses details of some of the reasons for this lack of felt connectedness and how it affects the teacher satisfaction and learnability of the design students. In addition, it reports the insights given by the instructors about some of the creative learning practices in design courses that they are currently finding challenging to replicate online.