Educational Radio Broadcasting During the Covid 19 Lockdown: Attitudes and Challenges Faculty of Arts and Humanities Sais-Fez Students as a Case Study

Abstract

This paper sheds light on a primeval medium of distance learning, educational radio broadcasting. It explores the attitudes of English Department students of Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Sais-Fez, Morocco, and probes its impact on them knowing that the majority of these students idealize computers and the internet as natural, necessitous components of their lives. This paper also seeks to find out the challenges that students encounter using radio broadcasts in their learning during the Covid 19 lockdown. Based on an online-questionnaire administered to 158 students, the study shows that though university students have an inextricable relationship with technology, they hold favorable attitudes towards educational radio broadcasts aired on two radio stations of Fez, namely Radio SNRT and Radio Plus. The findings also reveal that students consider radio educational broadcasts as a learning aid, but not a real substitute for in-class education, that has an effective impact on students’ learning during the Covid 19 lockdown. As for the challenges encountered by students, most of them are overcome as the audios are available on the faculty’s platform, and students can replay them any time according to their time and pace of learning.