Browsing by Author "Fonsell-Lehto, Kaisa"

In the spring of 2020, primary school students were transferred to distance education for health safety reasons. Distance education environments were set up from a wide variety of teachers’ and schools’ starting points at the expense of equality. The need for design-based research on IT-mediated teaching expanded from adult education environments to primary school, where the importance of self-determination was emphasized. The purpose of the study was to form recommendations for the primary school distance education provider by looking at the experiences of the guardians. For the description of distance education arrangements during the 2020 state of emergency this is a case study, and a design research for the development of distance education recommendations. The foundations for the thematic analysis was the theoretical distance education description by Simonson and Seepersaud (2019). The secondary data was received from an extensive national distance education and well-being project. 526 Helsinki-based guardians’ multi-perspective open text form responses were demarcated for examination. In the phenomenographic research method, experiences of the guardians were summarised using quantification. Recommendations for teachers, education organisers and guardians were formed through interpretation of the data. The perspective of guardians was well suited for the educational design research. According to the results, the most challenging situation in distance education was caused by weak selfdeter-mination of primary school aged children, which was best supported with the help of the teacher, if not the pupils’ own parent. Inequality was highlighted both in the quantity and quality of teaching provided by the teacher and in the home's ability to support the child. Surprisingly, the results described the normal conditions of modern school as a scene of noise, fears, bullying, stress and strain. About 10 % of guardians described distance education as a better learning environment for their child compared to normal conditions. As a guideline based on the design research, it is recommended that the primary school teacher provides daily support and assessment for the pupil, instructions available to the pupil, contact at home - but flexibly to case-by-case and depending on the teacher's competence, and continually developing one's own work.