College Students' Online Learning Experience: Characteristic Differences and Improving path

Author(s):  
YinQian Xuan
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 248
Author(s):  
Jiahua Zhou ◽  
Qiping Zhang

COVID-19 affected various aspects of our life. Many college students were forced to take courses remotely. It was not clear how they adapted to this new environment and how their mental health was affected. The objective of this study is to understand college students’ learning experience one year after the outbreak of COVID-19. An online survey was developed to investigate students’ overall learning process, mental health, perception of the learning community and student support. Sixty-two college students in the U.S. were recruited through an online survey platform. Findings of this study revealed: (1) improved mental health of college students compared to the beginning of the pandemic; (2) an overall positive learning experience and perceived belongingness to their learning community, as well as high satisfaction with the student support; (3) the major hindrance in the online learning environment was the lack of interactions with teachers and classmates; (4) a relationship between family income and perception of the learning community was discovered, and the students from low-income families were found to feel more belonging to the learning community; (5) hybrid was the optimum learning mode during COVID-19; (6) on-campus students perceived more student support than off-campus students. These findings provided a guideline for future research to further explore, and improve, the online learning environment.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy M. Hamm ◽  
Raymond P. Perry ◽  
Judith G. Chipperfield ◽  
Patti C. Parker ◽  
Jutta Heckhausen

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nourhan F. Wasfy ◽  
Enjy Abouzeid ◽  
Asmaa Abdel Nasser ◽  
Samar A. Ahmed ◽  
Ilham Youssry ◽  
...  

Abstract Background With the strike of Covid-19, an unprecedented rapid shift to remote learning happened worldwide with a paradigm shift to online learning from an institutional adjuvant luxury package and learner choice into a forced solo choice. This raises the question of quality assurance. While some groups have already established standards for online courses, teaching and programs yet very little information is included on methodology of their development and very little emphasis is placed on the online learning experience. Nevertheless, no work has been done specifically for medical education institutions. Aim To develop a set of descriptors for best practice in online learning in medical education utilizing existing expertise and needs. Methods This work utilizes a qualitative multistage approach to identify the descriptors of best practice in online learning starting with a question guided focus group, thematic analysis, Delphi technique and an expert consensus session done simultaneously for triangulation. This was done involving 32 institution in 19 countries. Results This materialized into the development of a set of standards, indicators, and development of a checklist for each standard area. The standard areas identified were organizational capacity, educational effectiveness, and human resources each of which listed a number of standards. Expert consensus sessions identified the need for qualification of data and thus the development of indicators for best practice. Conclusion Standards are needed for online learning experience and their development and redesign is situational and needs to be enhanced methodologically in axes that are pertaining to the needs of the education community. Taking such axes into consideration by educators and institutions will lead to planning and implementing successful online learning activities, while taking them into consideration by the evaluators will help them conduct comprehensive audits and provide stakeholders with highly informative evaluation reports.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 8053
Author(s):  
Maram Meccawy ◽  
Zilal Meccawy ◽  
Aisha Alsobhi

(1) This study demonstrates how a Saudi university has responded to the COVID-19 lockdown in order to examine the success factors and highlight any challenges. The main purpose was to determine the perceptions of students and faculty towards emergency online distance learning from a teaching and learning perspective; (2) A cross-faculty study was conducted: two different self-administered questionnaires were developed for students and faculty, respectively. In addition, data was collected from official reports; (3) The results show that students had a more positive perception of e-Learning despite the difficulties that they may have faced, while faculty results leaned slightly towards a negative perception. However, there was not a definite positive or negative perception, depending on the aspect of teaching that was being evaluated. The study also indicated that faculty and students’ gender had no significant effect on their perceptions. Overall results showed that the university performed well in accordance with three of the five pillars of online learning quality framework in terms of student satisfaction, access and scalability. On the other, improvements are needed to achieve better results for faculty satisfaction and learning effectiveness; (4) The findings present a number of suggestions for increasing satisfaction to improve the online learning experience post COVID-19.


Author(s):  
Peter Shea ◽  
Alexandra Pickett ◽  
Chun Sau Li

<p>Online learning environments provide an unprecedented opportunity to increase student access to higher education. Accomplishing this much needed goal requires the active participation and cooperation of university faculty from a broad spectrum of institutional settings. Although online learning has seen rapid growth in recent years, it remains a relatively small percentage of the entire curriculum of higher education today. As a relatively recent development, online teaching can be viewed through the lens of diffusion of innovation research. This paper reports on research from 913 professors from community colleges, four-year colleges, and university centers in an attempt to determine potential barriers to the continued growth in adoption of online teaching in higher education. It is concluded through factor and regression analysis that four variables are significantly associated with faculty satisfaction and their likelihood, therefore, to adopt or continue online teaching – these include levels of interaction in their online course, technical support, a positive learning experience in developing and teaching the course, and the discipline area in which they taught. Recommendations for institutional policy, faculty development, and further research are included. </p> <p><b>Keywords: </b>online teaching, faculty satisfaction, faculty development, diffusion of innovation, access, higher education, study </p>


ReCALL ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jérôme Eneau ◽  
Christine Develotte

AbstractThis study concerns the development of autonomy in adult learners working on an online learning platform as part of a professional master's degree programme in “French as a Foreign Language”. Our goal was to identify the influence of reflective and collaborative dimensions on the construction of autonomy for online learners in this programme. The material used was 27 self-analysis papers in response to an assignment which asked students to review their distance learning experience (reflective dimension) and to highlight the role of others, if any, in their learning (collaborative dimension). In addition to these two major points, the analysis by category of the body of results shows principally that in qualitative terms, the factors of autonomisation for online learning are interconnected and include: the difficulties related to distance learning and the strategies that learners develop to face those difficulties, the importance of interpersonal relationships in social and emotional terms in overcoming those difficulties, the specific modes of sociability developed for distance learning and the related development of a new type of autonomy that is both individual and collective. The discussion examines the creation, over the course of time, of a new “distance learning culture” that is nonetheless never easy to create and share.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (S3) ◽  
pp. 58-74
Author(s):  
Sandi Ferdiansyah ◽  
Supiastutik ◽  
Ria Angin

The present interview study reports on eight Thai undergraduate students’ experiences of online learning at three different Indonesian universities based in East Java, Indonesia. Semi-structured interviewing was designed based on the sociocultural framework proposed by Ma (2017) to elucidate the students’ voices of online learning experience. The data garnered from online interviewing were transcribed and interpreted using thematic content analysis. The study elicits three important data themes: the agility of the student participants to adapt online learning to suit their learning needs, the participants’ strategies to build learning autonomy, and the participants’ ability to sustain their learning motivation. This study stresses the important roles of such other agents as teachers, parents, and friends in providing international students with mental and emotional support to help them get through COVID-19 affected online learning.


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