Ethical precautions in synchronous interactions in the context of online classes

ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 pandemic has demanded emergency responses from all levels of education. Teaching has intensified the use of digital information and communication technologies (ICT). Virtual interaction between teachers and students has become a significant challenge, determining the need for professional training and expanding discussions about this model. This research aims to answer questions about ethical care in the context of online classes. It presents an analysis of the ethical care in synchronous interactions in the online classroom setting, considering the exposure of the participants’ image in synchronous meetings, the privacy, and the surveillance situation in the context of online classes. This is an exploratory, qualitative literature review study developed from articles published in journals available in the Capes repository, blogs in the education and communication area, and materials posted on video platforms between 2011 and 2021. The results showed that teachers and students are vulnerable to exposure, lack of privacy, and the surveillance context established by online education. The absence of normalization of conduct in digital spaces weakens teachers and students and provides opportunities for conduct that reach judicialization. Ethical care in synchronous contexts should be addressed at all levels of teacher training, and students should be educated to present ethical conducts as subjects of this virtual educational relationship.

Keywords:
Interaction; Ethics; Online Education; Online Classroom

RESUMO

A pandemia da Covid-19 exigiu respostas emergenciais de todos os níveis da educação. O ensino intensificou a utilização das tecnologias digitais da informação e comunicação (TDIC) e a interação virtual entre professores e estudantes passou a ser um grande desafio, determinando a necessidade de formação profissional e ampliando discussões acerca desse modelo. Esta pesquisa objetiva responder a questões a respeito dos cuidados éticos no contexto das aulas on-line. Apresenta uma análise dos cuidados éticos nas interações síncronas no cenário das aulas on-line, considerando a exposição da imagem dos participantes em encontros síncronos; a privacidade e a situação de vigilância no contexto das aulas on-line. Este é um estudo exploratório, qualitativo e de revisão bibliográfica desenvolvido a partir de artigos publicados em periódicos disponíveis no repositório da Capes, blogs da área de educação e comunicação e materiais publicados em plataformas de vídeo entre os anos de 2011 e 2021. Os resultados evidenciaram que professores e estudantes estão vulneráveis à exposição, à falta de privacidade e ao contexto de vigilância estabelecido pela educação on-line. A ausência de normatização de condutas em espaços digitais fragiliza professores e estudantes e oportuniza condutas que chegam à judicialização. Os cuidados éticos em contextos síncronos devem ser abordados em todos os níveis da formação docente e os estudantes devem ser educados para apresentarem condutas éticas como sujeitos dessa relação educativa virtual.

Palavras-chave:
Interação; Ética; Educação on-line; Aula on-line

Introduction

The 21st century is a stage of significant technological advancement and important achievements both in the biological sciences and all health areas. However, it was not enough to stop the Covid-19 pandemic that started in December 2019 (MARQUES et al., 2020). This, besides presenting itself as a significant threat to people’s health and lives, was responsible for extreme changes in the daily lives of all people. Social distancing, used as the primary measure of prevention and containment of the proliferation of the Coronavirus infection, was greatly responsible for changes in human interaction.

According to the report produced by the Comitê Gestor da Internet no Brasil (CGIBR, 2021), due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an expansion of online interaction, causing changes in people’s behavior and in the functioning of several segments, among which we highlight: a significant increase in the number of online purchases; transfers of workspaces to domestic environments; changes in the way family gatherings and festivities take place; large social events promoted on virtual stages (lives, concerts, etc.); and the massive presence of the Internet as a platform for social interaction. ); and the massive presence of digital models of education as an emergency measure to ensure the maintenance of educational activities at all levels of education and in most countries.

In this scenario, the use of the Internet was considered indispensable, as it ensured communication, access to information, maintenance of trade, and provision of services in health, such as telemedicine care, and education, online teaching, and allowed interaction between people belonging to different cultures and who were geographically distant (CGIBR, 2021).

Access to the Internet has become a “basic necessity,” and the impossibility of such access has impeded the fight against the pandemic. In this context of inevitable losses and interruptions in various segments of people’s lives, having or not having access to ICT marked different ways of living/surviving and denounced the violation of rights in various spheres, including education. The pandemic of Covid-19 affirmed the urgency of the democratization of the Internet as a means of effecting the maintenance of teaching activities for students of all social classes and all school levels (CASTELLI; SARVARY, 2021).

Access to online classes did not guarantee the effectiveness of the teaching and learning process because the demands of educating in the context of the pandemic, at all levels of education and through ICT, produced changes in the way of doing of teachers and students and, specifically, required the teacher to advance skills not only technical but also personal, to promote the effective learning of students better. Therefore, the pandemic demanded immediate answers from all educational researchers about a model that would guarantee the effectiveness and quality of the educational process (MOREIRA et al., 2020).

Marques et al. (2020), when presenting the historical overview of the Covid 19 pandemic, pointed out that the prevention of social contact and the change in people’s behavior enabled the occurrence of events that arose in the opposite direction of the chaos caused by the pandemic, such as phenomena of nature that could be detected by satellites due to the reduction of atmospheric pollution and the creation of solidarity networks to meet the deprivation of basic needs of some layers of the population.

In the education scenario, the phenomenon that we will highlight as the opposite of the problems of the pandemic, not to mention the various difficulties in the sector, is the presence of ICTs in the daily practice of teachers, configuring the need for investment in professional qualification, which led to changes in the performance of all those who were in the “front line” of education during the pandemic (MOREIRA et al. , 2020).

Studies on interaction in the process of teaching and online learning (COSTA et al., 2009; PIMENTEL, 2010; SANTOS et al., 2016), more specifically on interaction in educational activities in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic (CASTELLI; SARVARY, 2021; MOREIRA et al., 2020), allowed us to identify the need to investigate the ethical care that should guide the interaction in educational contexts mediated using digital artifacts.

This paper aims to investigate the possibilities of online interaction between teachers and students and the ethical implications of this virtual interaction model, focusing on synchronous interactions in the context of online classes and ethical care.

We will present the concept of online interaction as a tool for teaching and learning in online education, highlighting the resources available for its realization.

The concept of online interaction as a tool for teaching and learning in online education will be presented, as well as an analysis of the ethical care that should guide online encounters between teachers and students and the implications related to the absence of such care.

Methodology

This exploratory, qualitative literature review study was developed from articles published in journals available in the Capes repository between 2011 and 2021. The descriptors “interaction,” “online teaching,” “ethics,” and the Boolean operators “or” and “end” allowed access, in July 2021, to 38 texts, of which only 11 met the objectives of this research. Blogs in the field of education and communication, publications in the field of ICT, and materials published in video platforms, referenced throughout the text, were also used as theoretical references for this article.

The interaction in the teaching and learning process in online education

Based on sociological assumptions, the interaction between humans characterizes man’s social nature, determines the development of society, marks human identity, and distinguishes each historical moment. In this way, the capacity for human interaction enables the learning of all actions and the development of people in a society. Thus, learning is imbricated in interactive processes, has central importance in the maintenance of human life, and life itself in society can be described as an interactive process that enables constant teaching and learning, accompanying man until the day of his death (CHARON; VIGILANT, 2012).

Learning depends on interaction, and the history of school education is marked by different forms of interaction between the different identities that circulate the educational spaces (teachers, tutors, students), by the most diverse instruments of transmission or mediation of knowledge (books, blackboards, digital whiteboards, computers) and by the pedagogical models of intervention established from the very form in which this interaction occurs (NÓVOA, 2015).

The formal educational process, whether face-to-face or not, requires the establishment of learning objectives, the planning of pedagogical interventions, the preparation of materials by the teacher, and the teacher’s investment in the development of interaction strategies with the group of students, enabling the process of teaching and learning (ANTUNES; BATISTA, 2016).

In online teaching, there is also the need for other knowledge considered complementary or different from face-to-face teachings, such as the organization and structuring of the course in the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and the mastery of ICTs; the management of time in non-face-to-face spaces; online interaction resources with students; and strategies for the development of a collective or polydoctoral teaching (FARIA; NUNES, 2020).

In this teaching model, characterized by a multiplicity of actors, interaction is responsible for the qualification of the teaching and learning process. Pimentel (2010) presents interaction, communication, and mediated learning as fundamental elements of education permeated by technologies; he considers the communication that occurs through ICT as multidimensional, a generator of learning processes, and, essentially, dialogical.

Pimentel (2010) used the theoretical assumptions of Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory and presented the DTIC as a mediation instrument and the teacher/tutor as a mediator of the teaching and learning processes. The interaction is conceptualized as a reciprocal action that occurs between teachers and students, an action that involves subjective aspects of those involved and that can occur directly and/or indirectly. It is indirect when mediated by some technological resource. The teaching action takes place using technological resources and media that can favor learning, considering the necessary adaptations and expansions of these resources based on the needs demonstrated by the students.

Online teaching, with the use of ICTs, an educational modality that has characterized the educational panorama worldwide during the pandemic, has called on teachers to use interactive models that are different from face-to-face models. In this scenario, teachers from all educational levels had to adapt to varied online pedagogical practices and several interactions and communication technological resources. Cyberculture has been brought into the teaching spaces, and the possibilities of networked learning have manifested themselves in expressions such as: connect, post, chat, comment, share, collaborate, etc. (PIMENTEL; CARVALHO, 2020).

Online education, understood as a didactic-pedagogical approach, goes beyond what is known of the traditional model of non-presence education based on an instructional-massive perspective. In this model of traditional distance education, the ICTs are used as a resource for the presentation of content to students and not as a resource for interaction with students; the contents are closed, and the teacher makes use of media resources to deposit them in some VLE or virtual space and students perform activities in order to prove that the contents were studied, and, most of the time, these activities are performed in isolation (PIMENTEL; CARVALHO, 2020).

Online education, which differs from the traditional model of Distance Education (DE), aiming at critical and collaborative learning, has a proposal to promote (co)authorship, autonomy, and creativity of the student and a teaching mediation focused on interactivity and sharing. Online education establishes the need for interaction models that are different from the interaction models of EaD (SANTOS et al., 2016).

The interaction in an online education space occurs, fundamentally mediated by ICT and requires different ways of doing from the teacher and the student. To achieve the teaching objectives, the teacher socializes the content in a VLE or other virtual spaces and uses strategies that promote interactivity and collaborative learning. In this didactic-pedagogical model, the student is an active agent, capable of learning from his own investigations, which is characterized as self-learning (PIMENTEL; ARAUJO, 2020).

In online education, interaction can occur in synchronous moments, in which technological resources overcome distances, allowing teachers and students to communicate in real-time, and asynchronously, in which there is no simultaneous interaction (PIMENTEL, 2010).

In synchronous moments, students can interact with other classmates and with the teacher through chat and sharing of videos, audio, and images of texts. In asynchronous educational activities, the teacher uses several platforms to organize and publish the teaching materials and conduct evaluative activities. Asynchronous work is characterized using resources such as e-mail, discussion forums, video classes, electronic murals, blogs and communication applications (PIMENTEL; ARAUJO, 2020).

In reports of online teaching experiences during the pandemic, synchronous activities were considered as those that offered more benefits to teachers and students by sponsoring greater involvement and interactivity; enabling immediate and collaborative feedback in real-time learning; favoring the construction of collective identity and a sense of community; implying better student performance and less feeling of loneliness; and, prominently, were related to positive rates of mental health of teachers and students (CASTELLI; SARVARY, 2021).

In the educational scenario determined by the pandemic, the experiences of online teaching registered both forms of interaction, supporting the maintenance of this model of teaching and learning beyond the pandemic event and justifying the problematization in this text of the ethical care that should support the performance of teachers and students in synchronous moments of interaction.

Ethical care in interactions in the context of online classes

Ethics as a science of human behavior (ABBAGNANO, 2012) allows us to contextualize the formal spaces of education as places of ethical exercises, because, regardless of the historical moment, the school is founded on the perspective of right and wrong, good and evil, and on what should or should not be taught/learned. Since the first years of school life, ethics crosses all relationships that are established in the educational sphere and demands attitudes related to morals and virtues (TUGENDHAT,1996).

In this ethical perspective, the classroom is a community space in which the teacher-student relationship is based on ethical agreements that, whether formal or informal, should guarantee non-violence among subjects and ensure that the nature of the relationships established in educational spaces is fundamentally human. Without the guarantee of being governed by ethical precepts, the classroom is lost by the application of control and surveillance mechanisms imposed by the productivism logic and distances itself from all the principles of a humanistic education (BEZERRA, 2020).

This humanistic education can be characterized by changes in the figure of the teacher consistent with the transformations that the school and teaching have been undergoing throughout the century. The traditional schoolteacher, seen as the authority and owner of all knowledge, no longer meets the demands of the technological society, which requires the school to be a space for sharing knowledge; in this, the teacher is considered a mediator of knowledge (FREIRE, 1996).

Notably, the teaching and learning process mediated by ICT has changed the roles of the teacher and the student and the coexistence between them. The technologies have enabled a model of virtual coexistence in which students learn to relate to the world, to each other, and to themselves. Thus, in the same way, that the need for ethical behavior is established in non-virtual spaces of coexistence, the teaching mediated by ICT also advocates an ethical coexistence in which “[...] the singularity of each one is considered in consonance with the common good of others [...]” (BARREIRO; CARVALHO, 2017, p. 40).

The meetings between teachers and students, face-to-face or not, should go beyond the perspective of disciplining or formal learning spaces; they can be considered as opportunities to live with diversity, enhancing the imponderable, the improvisation, the informal exchange of personal experiences, conversations about social issues and the exposure of the subjectivity of the subjects involved. Potentially, the classroom is a stage for social exchanges, with agreements and disputes, as well as humanistic and citizenship education and the reproduction and recreation of moral and ethical values (MAGRI, 2020).

In the pandemic scenario, the urgency for this virtual coexistence represented many challenges and caused tensions, but, on the other hand, it opened several questions about the performance of teachers in this model of teaching mediated by technologies and about the ethical care that should permeate the virtual encounters between teachers and students.

ICTs make possible face-to-face encounters between teachers and students in digital media. In a videoconference, held through some computer system, two or more people, who are not sharing the same physical space, can establish several forms of interaction. The attention to ethical care in synchronous moments is related primarily to the conception of the human nature of these encounters (MOREIRA et al., 2018). During the pandemic, at all educational levels, synchronous encounters registered a series of events considered as not aligned with the ethical conduct that should guide class moments in any teaching model.

Bezerra (2020), presenting ethical issues in the educational environment, refers to some of the circumstances that denounce the ethical fragility that permeates the synchronous meetings, such as the temporary disconnection; the possibility of invisibility of the student who is online; the recording and sharing of images and content not authorized by all participants; the dispersion of students; the difficulties of the teacher in using technological tools; the interruption of interaction by the absence of the student unexpectedly; and insistent conduct of teachers to attract the attention of students and get feedback about being seen or not by the participants of synchronous activity.

Publications prior to the pandemic scenario about ethical issues in the context of online classes did not occur in the same volume in which practical issues related to online teaching were addressed. During the pandemic, scientific productions involving ethical care in online activities were also sparse compared to the numerous publications that recorded subjects such as online teaching strategies, the use of ICT, and assessments in non-face-to-face scenarios (ROMANCINI, 2012).

More than a decade ago, researchers in the field of EaD began discussions about ethics in online education (RAMOS, 2012; ROMANCINI, 2012; OLIVEIRA; CARNEIRO, 2005). Over the years, this theme has remained an object of investigation in some studies (MOREIRA et al., 2018 ; BARREIRO; CARVALHO, 2017; SILVA; BEZERRA, 2017), but there are still no formal normalizations that guide the educational relationships established between teachers and students in virtual spaces (RAMOS, 2012; ROMANCINI, 2012), which favors the ethical fragility to which teachers and students are subjected and justifies the need for research and publications on the subject.

We will present three perspectives about ethical care in synchronous interactive activities in the context of online classes in three subsections: a) exposure of the participants’ image; b) participants’ privacy; and c) surveillance situation in the context of online classes.

a) Exposure of the participants’ image

“It is not possible to think human beings away, even from ethics, let alone outside of it” (FREIRE, 1996, p. 16). Teaching requires ethics, favors the personal encounter between the subject that teaches and those who learn, and presupposes that there is no teaching without respect for autonomy; a student´s dignity, and identity; furthermore, there is no way that the teacher cannot be the figure to whom the student must consider his identity as a person, as a mediator of knowledge and subject producer of the interactions that take place in educational settings (FREIRE, 1996).

Since the beginning of social distancing, the educational sector, like several others, used videoconference platforms (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Skype, etc.) to maintain the activities performed before the pandemic. Teachers began to problematize intervention strategies and participate in training courses for the use of ICTs through virtual meetings and simultaneously started online activities with the group of students (MOREIRA et al., 2020). Therefore, the educational sector resumed the teaching activities “[...] without discussing the ethical issues for the good coexistence between the agents before these new conditions of exposure in digital media” (MAGRI, 2020).

In this scenario, the teacher began to record individual videos, organize webinars on the pages of educational institutions and publish their technical knowledge on social networks (MOREIRA et al., 2020). These actions produced ethical weaknesses when they did not consider the teacher’s freedom to choose to have, or not, their image exposed and/or used to represent and publicize the educational institution to which they belonged. Magri (2020) points out that this same exposure occurred in all the other sectors that started to develop synchronous activities during the period of social isolation and notes that the digital perception of the professional’s image became a source of concern for the organizations which are linked and for themselves.

The image of the teacher became part of the electronic files of students and, abundantly, of educational institutions, favoring the possibility of using them either with positive and ethical connotations or in derogatory and unethical situations (HADLER, 2020).

Peres-Neto (2020), when mentioning attacks on the teacher’s image in online class situations, does not consider that these negative behaviors were a response to the shock of this generation of students in the face of pandemic classes because even the students who reached higher education in 2020 have already grown up during digital technologies. According to the aforementioned author, for this generation, the new thing became the teacher on the screens and the virtual presence of the teacher in the students’ homes, regulating the school activities within the families. “[...] it is from this point on that we begin to glimpse new ethical issues. Understanding the limits, adequacies, and responsibilities in each social space is part of an ethical socialization process that goes beyond any border [...]” (PERES-NETO, 2020).

The imperative of the teacher’s adaptation to the DTIC overlapped with the need to think about the teacher’s place as a virtual subject in interaction with the students, who also became subjects in this context. The responsibility for conduct that compromise the teacher and the student was not brought up as a previous discussion agenda, not before several disrespectful events happened in synchronous moments, went viral on social networks and were judicialized.

The situations that exceed the ethical limits and are framed as criminal denounce the gravity of this scenario, and we are not referring only to events addressed to teachers by students but also to postures that, ignoring the school as an ethical space, were taken by teachers in online classes and that hurt moral and ethical values (HADLER, 2020). As an example, we cite the case of the teacher who was removed after masturbating in front of students during a synchronous interactive activity (LEÃO, 2020) and the case of the teacher who asks the student, who claims to be without clothes, to open the camera, also during an online class, and even offers points for her request to be met (SOUZA, 2020). There are videos available on the networks that, showing the same type of situation, denounce the exposure of the teacher’s image and the need for the attention of all professionals who make up the scenario of online education for the ethical fragility present in these moments of synchronous interaction.

A case of international repercussion was known as Reconnecting, in which a teacher was “trolled”¹ in an online class. In this situation, the students pretended to be disconnected and caused embarrassment to the teacher, who, unable to identify whether they were seeing her, showed spontaneous reactions of despair at the situation. The inability to operate the zoom platform and her consequent reaction to the embarrassment caused by the students was published in the TikTok channel by an American digital influencer and had over 75 million views and almost 11 million likes and was also reposted by thousands of young people of various nationalities (PERES-NETO, 2020).

The most curious thing is that the digital influencer who made the Reconnecting publication was not held judicially responsible. However, the TikTok channel was, which brings us questions about the use of third parties images on the networks and the responsibility of those who publish them (PERES-NETO, 2020). We can also mention the numerous publications available on social networks of online classrooms, class excerpts, and the infinity of suggestions on “how to troll your teacher.”

We believe that similar events may occur in face-to-face teaching spaces. However, we have to consider the seriousness of the implications when they occur in a virtual environment for reasons peculiar to the digital universe, such as they are easy to share and may become part of the network permanently, endlessly compromising the identity of those involved. Synchronous meetings may weaken the image of the teacher since there is the risk that the subject who is not seen in person may not be recognized or may become unknown because he or she does not identify with what is being perceived by other subjects in the virtual space. To consider that there are subjects behind the screen is to conceive the online class space as made up of people, not participants (HADLER, 2020).

b) Privacy in synchronous moments

In synchronous activities, interactions occur between teachers and students and among students themselves in a similar way to face-to-face teaching. This interactive movement happens permeated by dialogicity and enables the emergence of events beyond those predicted by the teacher and that go beyond the mere transmission of content (SANTOS et al., 2016).

The face-to-face or online classroom is a space for learning and interactions that should be guided by ethical conduct and moral values. Besides the interactions related to formal content, teachers and students interact spontaneously and may expose personal experiences or individual positions related to various contexts. Moreover, it is possible that affective relationships emerge from classroom interaction that goes beyond the space and time of the teaching activities. These teaching spaces, being relational in nature, should favor humanistic and citizen formation and the reproduction and recreation of moral values (BEZERRA, 2020).

In face-to-face activities, interactions occur involving a group of students and the teacher in a physical space demarcated by walls and doors where there are no witnesses other than those in the eyes of all participants. In this face-to-face context, implicit and explicit agreements and physical space boundaries ensure these relationships’ privacy. In the online classroom, in synchronous activities, it is possible to permanently record the images and other communications made by any participant, and there may also be the non-consented or accidental presence of people who are not participating in the activity but who are in the physical environment in which the activity is taking place. For Castelli and Sarvary (2021), this context threatens the privacy of teachers and students, may limit the spontaneity of these interactions, and hinder the adherence of students to the online teaching model.

Face-to-face classes are not free from being photographed or filmed; however, in Bezerra’s (2020) study, teachers found it easier to control these actions in the physical class space because all participants can protect their images. In contrast, in the synchronous class context, participants are unable to view participant’s conduct and are subject to only one click to be recorded or photographed.

It is possible to contract the issue of recording the online class by means of video, audio ,or images, establishing with the student body which part of the synchronous meeting can be recorded, as well as defining a priori where the sharing of the recorded material will take place. Bezerra (2020) suggests as one of the ways and ethical precautions involving this issue that the recordings should be limited to strictly formal and content-related moments and carried out before the need to make the material available to absent students and/or to be reviewed by those who were present as a learning resource.

c) Surveillance situation in the context of online classes

The contemporary advent of ICTs does not allow us invisibility, we are filmed and photographed in simple daily activities, and we do not let anything escape our clicks; even if the videos we save and the photos we collect in the galleries of smartphones are later discarded, we compulsively record everything that happens around us. Zuboff (2018) describes the power of surveillance in contemporary society and points to the illusion of freedom and the false sense of security established by surveillance from cameras and computer systems.

It is not uncommon for us to look at the world through the eyes of cameras with very high resolutions; if we observe the in-person festive activities held at school, there will be parents and family members there with cameras watching their children dance or recite poems. Everything is reliably watched. Often, performing students find it challenging to identify their family members in the audience, but everything will be on camera. The meeting of the gaze is missing, but there is a digital eye that registers all the moments quickly; they can be posted on a social network.

In this cybercultural universe, it is possible to register and share almost automatically without time for critical reflection (BAUMGARTNER, 2020). Students and teachers have social networks and tend to feed them with their daily routine and, in this routine, are the daily academic activities, configuring the situation of surveillance to which teachers and students are subjected in synchronous activities.

In synchronous moments, interactions between students and professors will be securely guarded, and everything can be registered in the name of the activity’s security: the participants, the duration of the event, the meeting participants’ data, and the resources used during videoconferencing. Moreover, one of the most frequently cited issues in the context of media surveillance during the pandemic has been the accidental appearance of participants’ intimacy. Online classes running in home environments are captured beyond the image of the students.

One of the protective strategies adopted by participants of synchronous moments was to use the devices’ cameras in “closed mode” to prevent their images from being seen by other students and teachers in online classes. In Castelli and Sarvary’s research (2021), students presented the main reasons for not allowing themselves to be seen by classmates and teachers: the difficulties they have with their appearance; for feeling embarrassed to show their home environment, and for not having a private place to participate in synchronous online classes in their homes. The authors argue that the ethical conduct of the teacher and the educational institution should respect the students’ choice of whether to open the cameras during synchronous meetings.

Teachers, in turn, report difficulties in interacting with students when they cannot visualize what is happening with them in synchronous moments and suffering and loneliness during synchronous work. Similarly, the students and some teachers mention that they have their personal lives exposed when they open the cameras and present spaces of their private lives in professional activities (CASTELLI; SARVARY, 2021).

Situations with severe ethical implications are related to the fact that teachers in synchronous activities are supervised by other professionals in real-time or in cases where they are forced to leave online classes in the repositories of educational institutions in the name of the quality of the educational work or the expansion of access to classes for students who were absent at the synchronous moment.

The surveillance culture disseminated in online teaching spaces points to the need to establish rules and contracts that favor a climate of trust in synchronous moments and expand the dialogue between teachers and students to ensure that the educational space is qualified as ethical.

Final considerations

The Covid-19 pandemic demanded extreme changes in the functioning of society, and educational institutions gave immediate responses, meeting the need for teaching using digital technologies. The replacement of face-to-face interaction by asynchronous and synchronous interaction modalities determined the rapid development of skills for using digital teaching tools and the adaptation to new behavior patterns imposed by this new model of teaching and learning.

The experiences of synchronous interactions lived in the pandemic scenario showed that they favor learning but that they also produce tensions, as the situations in which teachers and students had their identities exposed in social networks and video-sharing platforms denounce the need for teacher training and reflections with students about the ethical care that involves these interactions.

The synchronous interactions in online educational spaces are similar to those that occur in face-to-face classrooms but essentially different because they take place in virtual educational spaces and favor experiences of insecurity regarding the limits of image exposure, ensure little privacy and establish a situation of constant surveillance by the exposure of teachers and students to audio and video recording resources.

The interactions in synchronous educational spaces require a contractual agreement between teachers and students regarding ethical conduct. Therefore, the beginning of synchronous activities needs to be marked by discussions about the ethical precautions that should guide the conduct so that the ethical criteria guiding virtual relationships can be established, ensuring the safety and privacy of participants in these spaces.

The absence of specific ethical regulations for the context of synchronous classes does not justify any act that makes teachers and students vulnerable. Moreover, we do not bet on the existence of laws or regulations to curb attacks on the image and privacy of teachers and students; we believe that we will have better results from continuous educational actions that enable the actors of this technology-mediated teaching to assume ethical conduct.

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• 1
  Trolling is an internet slang meaning to tease and make fun of someone. It consists of making fun of the participants of discussions in internet forums, with nonsensical arguments, to enrage and disturb the conversation.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  20 Mar 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  18 Sept 2021
• Accepted
  12 Dec 2022