Comparative analysis of students’ views of online learning in the first and second Covid-19 semesters: examples from Türkiye, Poland, Republic of North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

The abrupt change from face-to-face to Online Learning (OL) in the emergency COVID-19 semester surprised and forced students to alter their study habits. Then came the second online period, and students were expected to be happier and more successful since now they were familiar with OL. Was this the case? Had the ways students learned, their perceptions of human interactions among teachers and students in OL, their opinions on the learning environment and their computer literacy changed? Our paper aims to answer those questions using comparative analyses of data sets from the first and second OL periods and attempts to uncover the positive and negative shifts and the topics that remained unchanged. The study’s findings show that COVID-19 related educational changes had multidirectional influences on students’ learning, ingroup interactions, and views about education and OL. Hopefully, the empirical data collected in this study will provide valuable information about OL’s immediate and prolonged effects.

Crowdsourcing and language learning habits and practices in Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of North Macedonia and Poland in the pre-pandemic and pandemic periods

“…Their use was beginning to gain pace, but they were still not often used in the educational context (Chen et al, 2020;Jiang et al, 2018) or in the four countries examined in this study (i.e., TUR, B&H, RNM and POL) (Miloshevska et al, 2021). The rapid switch from face-to-face to online learning, however, surprised and forced students, teachers, and institutions to alter their teaching and learning practices (Delibegović Džanić et al, in press;Hatipoğlu et al, 2022). What about the crowdsourcing resources that students use to learn languages?…”

“…In our opinion, this emphasizes once more not only the richness of such resources (Chen et al, 2020;Kansal et al, 2021), but also the search of students for materials that best suit their needs. It thus looks as if the second COVID-19 period was a period of self-discovery, context discovery and switching from a teacher dependent to a more autonomous learner profile (also see Hatipoğlu et al, 2022).…”