Open AccessWhy Keep Silent Online? Voices from Stay-at-home Postgraduate Students
Author(s) -
Xiaofeng Zhou
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
international journal of social science studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2324-8041
pISSN - 2324-8033
DOI - 10.11114/ijsss.v9i4.5249
Subject(s) - popularity , silence , class (philosophy) , recall , psychology , mathematics education , medical education , pedagogy , social psychology , computer science , medicine , art , artificial intelligence , cognitive psychology , aesthetics
Online classroom silence is an overlooked site of research irrespective of the growing popularity of online teaching in today’s education. Against this background, this study showcases why a group of postgraduate students keep silent in their online classes through classroom observation, stimulated recall interviews and in-depth interviews. Reasons found are classified into three categories: the peculiarity of online class, the uniqueness of postgraduate academic lesson, and other general reasons resembling the ones in the traditional classroom. In addition, these factors are found to be interconnected and sometimes exerting both positive and negative effects; unexpectedly, the factor of ‘losing face’, contrary to previous studies, is trivial in contributing to postgraduate students’ online-classroom silence.