Communication Research in Pandemic Times: The Case of ROTL

Higher Education saw a paradigm shift during Covid 19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown. Educational Institutions soon geared up to resume teaching and learning by adopting new technologies. Teachers and researchers were pushed to figure out ways in coping with their personal and professional demands besides the Pandemic. Research is vital to Academics. When online teaching was a huge challenge, could there be space for Research? But Institutions shortly started to resume Conferences and Seminars in an online mode. Though it did take away the pleasures of face-to-face interaction which is the hallmark of social science research, the pandemic made researchers use the available facilities. In such a scenario, a group of Indian Media Academicians-who are in the senior and mid-career level - decided to undertake the task of researching online education. The group titled Research on Online Teaching and Learning (ROTL) undertook a huge responsibility and shouldered it through various issues in spite of other commitments. The proposed paper doesn't focus on the findings but examines the process of designing and implementing social science research for a diverse country like India. The informal team of 18 people (6 men and 12 women) joined hands in an online mode around May 2020 and by the time tool formalization took place became 11 people (2 men and 9 women). The data of a total of 1860 students and 290 teachers engaged in media education across India were surveyed using online questionnaires during February 2021. The paper intends to focus on the experiences of women researchers who during the pandemic times, lockdown and Work from home took up a full-time responsibility — Teaching, care work, fear of contracting the virus, voluntary research projects and everything else that they managed. Using an autoethnography method and interviews with fellow researchers, the authors plan to examine this novel experiment of collaborative group research during pandemic times and the challenges faced by women researchers.