Opportunities and Threats of Virtualization of Teacher-Student Interactions in the Covid-19 Pandemic

Introduction: The spread of the Covid 19 epidemic has changed the pattern of many human interactions from face-to-face to virtual. One such interaction is that between teacherand student. Face-to-face interactions included not only sharing information, data, and educating students, but also gathering students around some dedicated and ethical professors and observing their character and behavior, leading to professor role modeling, discipleship, and student socialization in the college setting.
This change has created opportunities and threats to the interactions that this study attempted to address.
Methods: The method used in this research is a qualitative phenomenology method. The research instrument is a semi-structured in-depth interview and observation. The statistical population includes faculty members in Tehran from various humanities disciplines, 20 of whom were selected through purposive sampling using snowball or chain sampling.
Finding: The analysis showed that cyber interactions are a double-edged sword that is both opportunistic and threatening. On the one hand, by increasing the volume, speed, and variety of data transfer, this space creates new opportunities and possibilities, such as the flexibility of space and time and the ease of interaction, collaboration, and scholarly participation and lowering the cost of interactions, eliminating scholarly hierarchy and increasing equity, expanding audiences, increasing the possibility of networking, increasing new interactive opportunities and scholarly knowledge within and outside the country in the area of teacher-student relationships, and on the other hand with challenges and threats such as. Difficulties in accessing electronic science resources, lack of skills and intellectual readiness of individuals in the face of cyberspace, multiplication of the digital gap and educational inequity, reduction of mutual trust, safety, and freedom of expression, limitation of recognition of special and gifted students, reduction of feedback, dynamics, and rhetoric of interaction, reduction in informal and emotional interactions, reduction in collective enthusiasm and motivation for participation, reduction in control and monitoring, reflection and focus in the classroom, reduction in the quality, depth, continuity, and motivation of interactions and academic collaboration, and reduction in socialization in the area of these relationships were associated.
Conclusion: according to the research results, in the near future, if the model of cyber interactions becomes the only educational model in the country, apart from the possible benefits it will have due to the problems mentioned above, we will see a decrease in the quality of education in universities. Therefore, virtual interactions must be managed to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the virtual space and minimize the challenges associated with its use. The researcher suggests using a combination of virtual and face-to-face interactions to manage faculty-learner interactions during the Covid-19 outbreak.