Student Learning Experience in a New Education Environment During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic had posed an unprecedented impact and challenge in organising teaching activities for staff and learning for students in higher education (Krishnamurthy, 2020; Kuhfeld et al., 2020; Sundarasen et al., 2020). It became quite impossible to deliver classes in the face-to-face mode due to the strict social distancing requirements. Universities were closed for both students and staff with short notice without any other option but to deliver all classes online to ensure that all teaching activities are accessible to students. It was a challenging period for universities facing loss of new international students due to travel restrictions. Hence, retention of students who are already enrolled was critical in this challenging and changed education environment. There is a pedagogical shift from traditional to online teaching, from lecture theatre to zoom or Microsoft Teams, and from seminars to webinars (Almarzooq et al., 2020; Martinez, 2020).

Online learning has already been proposed as a possible substitute for face-to-face learning prior to this crisis (Stacey et al., 2004; Meyer, 2008). In comparison with online learning, emergency remote learning is a temporary shift of course delivery to the alternate delivery mode (Hodges et al. 2020). Although necessary infrastructures for this transition are available, the implementation of the transition to emergency remote learning faced a number of significant challenges. The lack of appropriate training and skills in online knowledge transmission, digital teaching, and other online activities meant lecturers faced many challenges moving from face-to-face approach to online delivery at short notice. It in turn has the potential to make the communication between teaching staff and students not as effective as the face-to-face teaching with adverse effect on the quality of teaching.

On the other hand, students also face many challenges and hardships regarding the accessibility of learning resources, necessary skills, hands-on experience on practical classes and laboratory work. While some students enjoyed learning online, others had concerns due to lack of accessibility to teaching resources, engagement with other students and staff, and concentration. During online delivery, students with less opportunities, e.g. slow network connections or lack of appropriate equipment and poor digital skills, were likely to suffer more. It has been found that students who did not properly use educational technologies had a lower perception of emotional involvement and cognitive engagement. In addition, the students’ attitude towards educational technology has a direct impact on their academic performance (Ali, 2020; Patricia, 2020). These difficulties are related to the new perspectives of online education and their technological complexities. Some positive and negative aspects of online classes were discussed in the literature by Tiene (2020).

Although there are already some studies on the students’ experience of emergency remote learning, the engineering students’ perceptions have seldom been reported, though the engineering programme poses unique challenges during the shift to emergency remote learning. This paper presents the results of a student survey carried out at Western Sydney University (WSU) in Australia during the pandemic and analyses the experience and feedback of engineering students on emergency remote learning. The survey was built in the context of emergency remote learning during the pandemic as well as the broad online learning. The main objective of the survey was to investigate the perception of WSU students regarding emergency remote learning and online learning to provide meaningful data that can be used for further improvement of online teaching and learning. The specific objectives are:

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  To study the perceptions of students on online teaching during the pandemic;

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  To identify the positive and negative aspects of online learning reported by students;

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  To examine the challenges faced by the students in adapting to the online teaching-learning process in order to offer future solutions to remedy them;

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  To discuss new methodologies with potential to be adopted in future class delivery.