Bangladeshi tertiary level students’ perceptions on online synchronous and asynchronous learning as a humanistic learning

Abstract

"Since the time of Covid-19, online classes have got wider recognition. Even in today when the world is healing, and everything is happening on-site, online classes did not lose its existence. However, in today’s post COVID world, the students are facing stress, frustration, and many other mental and physical challenges. So, their learning environment should be such which is considerable to their physical and mental states. In such case, humanistic education might be a suitable teaching approach as it speaks for empathy in education along with many other skills for the development of the learners. Nevertheless, so far, very limited research study has concentrated on the humanistic education in online classes where humanistic learning approach needs more recognition in today’s post COVID era for enabling students to learn along with coping up with their personal hardships. That is why this research focuses on how much humanistic role the teachers play in the online synchronous and asynchronous classes, and also some barriers of humanistic education in such classroom settings from the perspective of Bangladeshi students. This study has taken a qualitative research approach where one by one interview has been selected as the data collection tool. Fifteen students from different universities of Bangladesh took part in this research study. From the interviews with the participants, it has been found that the students of Bangladesh are well acquainted with various online synchronous and asynchronous classes where they think that their teachers play multifarious humanistic roles by showing empathy to the students, inspiring creative thinking, allowing learning at own pace, and promoting learner autonomy in the classrooms. However, some barriers of humanistic education in online classes have been spotted as well like difficulty in emphasizing empathy and authority in the classrooms due to communication gap in online asynchronous classes, and also the inability of the teachers to allow learning at own pace to the learners for being liable to a fixed schedule. This study also recommends some solutions for overcoming the apparent challenges founded in this study. Overall, this research study acknowledges the concept of humanistic education in online classes, and thus opens up scopes for further scholarly work in the related field."