The Determinants of Student Attitude Toward E-Learning Academic Achievement During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction

Since the end of 2019, the world has been suffering from COVID-19 which has resulted in a global health emergency (Marek, Chew & Wu, 2021). In order to prevent the virus from spreading, many countries enacted complete lockdowns (Bozkurt & Sharma, 2020). Many educational institutions have decided to stop students from attending classes in person to carry out social distancing and contain the pandemic. Emergency remote education, as a temporary shift from traditional pedagogy to alternate delivery modes (e.g., E-learning) during a crisis, is employed for teaching to prevent the interruption of education (Bozkurt, & Sharma, 2020). Under normal circumstances, e-learning is an alternative to many pedagogies; however, under pandemic restrictions, e-learning has become the main pedagogy available to teachers in many countries (Sharma & Bumb, 2021).

However, Ali (2020) revealed that most instructors were not ready to implement e-learning due to lack of training for using the system platforms. Ali also indicated that although young students are good at using mobile technology, they lack the theorical knowledge for computer skills. There is still no systematic study for the e-learning quality and e-learning satisfaction when the educational institutions must fully adopt e-learning (Marek et al., 2021). The impacts of e-learning on students’ academic achievements and their behavioral intentions are also essential issues (Udo, Bagchi & Kirs, 2011), which have become more critical in the current COVID-19 pandemic situation.

Previous studies have shown that the user satisfaction model can effectively explain the influence of e-learning quality factors on e-learning satisfaction, academic achievement, and subsequent use willingness (Cidral, Oliverira, Felice & Aparicio, 2018). The empirical evidence revealed that the service quality of e-learning is a key factor affecting student satisfaction and learning achievement (Al-Fraihat, Joy, Masa'deh & Sinclair, 2020). Pham, Limbu, Bui, Nguyen and Pham (2019) asserted that comparison of the affect of different e-learning quality dimensions on student satisfaction is a topic worthy of further study. Udo et al. (2011) used SERVQUAL to evaluate students' e-learning experience, and claimed that the various e-learning quality dimensions will affect overall e-learning quality. Besides, Pham et al. (2019) used system quality, instructor quality, course materials quality, and administrative and support service quality to measure overall e-learning service quality. They found that the contribution of each dimension to overall e-learning quality is different.

Udo et al. (2011) and Pham et al.’s (2019) findings imply a formative structure of e-learning quality which is composed by its dimensions. Therefore, this study proposes two formative constructs, named instructor teaching quality and e-learning system quality, to explore the impact of those two e-learning quality constructs on e-learning satisfaction and academic achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, when all students are required to enroll in emergency remote education, it is necessary to clarify whether these two types of e-learning quality will have varying degrees of impact on students' e-learning satisfaction and academic achievement. Besides, many empirical pieces of evidence have shown that students’ satisfaction influences their academic achievement and intention to continue enrolling in e-learning courses (Hwang & Choi, 2019; Al-Fraihat et al., 2020). However, under the full implementation of e-learning, whether this relationship can still be established has not yet been confirmed. Therefore, this study aims to explore whether instructor teaching quality and e-learning system quality can improve students’ academic achievement by improving their e-learning satisfaction, and promote students’ behavioral intention to adopt e-learning during a pandemic.