Results of remote, online focus groups on graduates’ experiences in spring 2020, during the first COVID wave period

Abstract

In spring 2020, the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic radically changed the lives of all of us, including the students graduating this year. Graduating students are a special group: because of their life situation, they were looking forward to experiencing and celebrating major turning points - all of which were missed or took other forms. What is more, this period also marked the end of an epoch in the lives of the groups studied, coinciding with the period of COVID-19, which can also be characterised as a turning point.

In our research, we used remote, online focus group discussions to explore the perceptions of the graduating students about the graduation period they experienced. The focus group discussions were not only conducted online but were also audio-visual (as opposed to the previously prevalent real-time, but text-based online focus groups, including typing). A methodological specificity of the situation forced by the epidemic was that the group was moderated by students who were educated in absence (in absentia) on online video conferencing platforms, who were close in age to the group concerned, on the topic of online education, also online. In this paper, we report on these methodological experiences, which could certainly be used by others in the future, and summarise the experiences of the remote, online focus group discussions. In the focus group discussions, the perceptions of the graduates about the potential of online education for the future were a dominant feature.