The master's thesis explores the work organisation of teachers and parents of children in Program with Lower Educational Standard and Special Education Program at the primary school Osnovna šola Antona Janše Radovljica during the COVID-19 epidemic. The theme is topical, as it is not only connected to the current period of the epidemic but is highly related to the challenges of digitalisation of the educational system and distance learning in general. In the first part of the theoretical part, the work of the chosen primary school and the presentation of the programmes, which children with special needs attend, are included. The second part is connected to the understanding of distance learning and the presentation of the models and guidelines that were accepted by the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport in cooperation with the National Education Institute Slovenia and Slovenian National Institute of Public Health. The results from the current researches in this field are also presented.
In the empirical part, the results of quantitative research in which 20 teachers and 43 parents of children, who attend the chosen school, participated, are presented. The main purpose of the research is to determine, what kind and how successful was the work organisation of the teachers and parents of the children in the Program with Lower Educational Standard and Special Education Program. We were also interested in how successfully parents as well as teachers confronted the situation of distance learning and what kind of obstacles and problems they faced. The results show that more than half of the parents felt that they successfully coordinated school and other responsibilities during distance learning. More than half of parents also felt competent using online and other tools. It appeared that students’ parents had the most problems participating in videoconferences. Among the parents of the students, who attend Program with Lower Educational Standard and those who attend Special Education Program, there were no major differences. Nevertheless, we established that parents of the students, who attend Program with lower Educational Standard, felt more competent to help their children with schoolwork during distance learning. It appears that this working method presents a challenge for the teachers because of time organisation. There were no major differences among the teachers of both programmes. Distance learning and the related usage of different online tools have shown that younger teachers are more competent for the use of different online tools, such as Zoom, MS Teams, Google Meet, and others. With the obtained results of the analysis, we also presented the answers to the open questions, which bring important insight into the experience of distance learning of teachers as well as parents.
The research reveals the understanding of the obstacles with which teachers and parents were confronted. With the obtained results, we got a more detailed insight into the work organisation of teachers and parents of the children with special needs, who attend Programs with Lower Educational Standard and Special Educational Programs, because recently there has been hardly any research done for this type of population.
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