In the words of Lilia Shutyak "Online learning gave students the opportunity to be more involved in work"

Lilia Shutyak has been teaching at the Department of Journalism of Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University for over ten years. She collaborates with cultural projects and with multiple media and is also actively involved in overcoming the challenges of COVID-19 in the field of education, offering innovative solutions.

As it happens, in late February – early March 2020, the first COVID-19 patient in Ukraine was registered in Chernivtsi. His illness was widely covered in the Ukrainian and international media, a press conference was held near his house, and as panic gripped ordinary citizens and official authorities, the media needed to react quickly. Thus, the vocabulary of the media was transformed before our very eyes – moving from information incitement to explanatory journalism.

It was at that time that I decided to join in raising awareness about the pandemic and exposing the fakes in the media, which were blazing red hot on the Internet.

During the lockdown, I added two new fact-checking topics to my “Internet Journalism” university course. On top of that during this period I conducted 3-4 master classes for students of our university and non-university audiences on combating fakes about COVID. The issue turned out to be very relevant and necessary to help navigate and respond correctly to provocative headlines.

Chernivtsi is one of the first cities to be placed in the "red zone", so our university, alongside with its students and teachers, also became the first among educational institutions that had to adapt to the new challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Teachers tried to figure out how to build effective communication so that students involved in online learning could receive education no worse than in classrooms. It was a difficult time, because the traditional educational process became impossible due to quarantine restrictions.

The other side of this issue was the need to master new technologies and platforms for communication. We were considering several options and settled on the one that would be the most secure as far as confidentiality of both students and teaching staff was concerned.

Many people complain about online education, but in my opinion, online learning has allowed all students, regardless of gender, to be more involved in work. The higher attendance of online seminars was also encouraging. To put it in numbers, average attendance reached almost 90% and sometimes peaked at 100%.

New language emerged, for example, “raising one’s hand” using the button or “+” in chat instead of the usual conversation in the classroom. This gave teachers the opportunity to make classes more interactive in order to gage the participation of the audience.

Of course, for some of the teaching staff organizing work online became a challenge, not so much due to their age, but more to do with the habitual way of teaching. Over time we realized that this quarantine was to stay with us for a long time and we had to adapt in order to stay in the profession. We helped each other, shared guides and links to online courses and useful platforms. This united us.

I think that many women, like myself, are faced with an increase in the number of household chores related to cooking and cleaning. If earlier it was possible to eat out more often, now I had to significantly expand my knowledge of cooking. When the family is at home all the time, it means that you need to cook a lot more. Sometimes it took a toll on my working day and caused issues with my time management. Of course, now we are trying to evenly distribute responsibilities, I would say that we have coped. I can only imagine how many families had not come to an agreement on this issue, and all household responsibilities fell on the women in the family.

Now, when we are on the verge of a new wave of quarantine restrictions, it will not be difficult for us to adapt, because all the processes have been fine-tuned, teachers and students have improved their skills in preparing lectures, seminars and presentations, as well as mastered new technologies.

We shall manage.

The article created as part of the UN Women Project “Advancing Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment through Decentralization Reform of Ukraine” funded by the Government of Canada.