COVID-19 and Changes in Education
Spas Rangelov
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Republic of Korea
Email: rangelovsa@yahoo.com
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted universities and academic communication in them during the spring and the autumn semesters of 2020. Professors and students were faced with new and constantly changing conditions that required more intensive communication through channels that were mainly supplementary when the main interaction happened face-to-face in classrooms. Within two or three weeks established communication patterns were replaced with new unplanned communication patterns that kept reshaping in time. Communication was crucial for the existence and the survival of the academic and educational process. In this article the author examines as both a witness and a researcher the situation at the Bulgarian Studies major at HUFS from the viewpoint of Communication Theory. The methods of cyber-ethnography and autoethnography were employed. Conclusions are drawn about the communication processes that were influenced by the pandemic.
Key words: communication, education, university, Bulgarian Studies, COVID-19.