The Psyche of “Self” in Students’ Systemic and Structural Interaction with Online Teaching-Learning Platforms

This research explores and provides insights on students’ psyche of “self” as characterized by their self-evaluations of their systemic and structural interactions with the online teaching-learning platforms that serves as their virtual classroom since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having such insights is of significance towards understanding the functional interactivenesses of virtual platforms that serve as online digitized classrooms used for teaching and learning in tertiary academic institutions, and which usage has gained global acceptance since the advent of COVID-19 pandemic. This has resulted in a systemic and structural shift towards virtual education among tertiary institutions, with the requisite restructuring of face-to-face teaching-learning mechanisms into new online delivery systems. Considering the fact that such new online systems, which are digitized educational instruction media, are mostly designed by third parties who are not the direct users, there is a need to provide users, namely teachers and students, the space to share the psyche of their “selves” which could be used to develop a sense of their self-evaluative perspectives of the effectiveness of the current approaches to such instructional design, in terms of the quality and effectiveness of their interactivenesses. As it is posited in the extant literature, self-evaluation is crucial to mental and social well-being due to the influences it exerts on a person’s aspirations, personal goals and interaction with others. Thus, self-evaluation, provides personal insights on the beliefs and evaluations individuals hold about themselves, helping to determine who they are, their capabilities, and future developments. These insights are manifestation of the psyche of “self”, deemed as powerful inner influences that provide individuals internal guiding mechanisms that help steer and nurture them through the dynamics of life, governing their behavior in the process, and defining the character of their individual self-concept and self-esteem, and by extension their self-image and self-perception. With self-concept manifesting individual beliefs and knowledge about personal attributes and qualities, it represents a cognitive schema that organizes abstract and concrete views about the “self”, and controls the processing of self-relevant information. The extraction of such an information, especially from students perspectives, is deemed important to enable the systemic and structural design of quality virtual platforms used as online classrooms and quality interactive teaching-learning activity. In this study, therefore, data was collected from six hundred and eighty-seven graduate students in a Ghanaian university, using a structured questionnaire that enabled the students to process self-relevant information associated with the quality of their systemic and structural interaction with online teaching-learning platform used in teaching them throughout the semester. Guided by Bedny and Karwowski's well-established knowledge that activities of individuals are realized by goal-directed actions, informed either by mental or motor conscious processes, as objects of the cognitive psychology of skills and performances, systemic analysis is conducted and the learning from the students self-evaluation determined. The findings will provide additional insight in the design of virtual platforms serving as online classrooms for teaching-learning.