COVID-19 and Higher Education: First-Year Students’ Expectations toward Distance Learning

Abstract

The article deals with distance education, which as a teaching method had to be suddenly introduced in schools and higher education institutions as a result of the global pandemic situation. The paper captures the second wave of Poland’s pandemic situation in relation to global circumstances and the methods of conducting distance learning used across the globe. The purpose of this study was to investigate first-year students’ expectations about the education shift to distance learning. GETAMEL, which is the adapted General Extended Technology Acceptance Model for E-Learning, was used in the study. The study analyzed the influence of Experience, Subjective Norms, Enjoyment, Computer Anxiety, and Self-Efficacy on students’ expectations in the context of distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. To test the research model presented during the research, The Partial Least Squares method of Structural Equation Modeling was used. An online survey was created to conduct the research, which collected data from 670 Polish first-year undergraduate students. The acquired data were analyzed using the SmartPLS 3 software. The results of the research indicated that the most important factors that influence the feelings of students and can convince them to change from teaching in the classroom to teaching in the distance learning model are the feeling of pleasure in this form of education and a sense of self-efficacy. The results of this study may be of particular interest to education practitioners, including teachers, and a starting point for further research on e-learning models, including, in particular, the understanding of students’ expectations regarding distance learning.

Remote learning among students with and without reading difficulties during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…All groups (DYS, SIDYS, CON) claimed that the workload during the online semester was greater than during the in-site winter semester which can be due to the specificity of remote learning, lecturers' substantive and technical competencies related to the remote teaching as well as students' technical competencies. As a result of sudden changes in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, many academic lecturers in Poland could provide only (or mainly) asynchronous remote teaching in which students were given tasks for self-study based on written materials (Cicha et al, 2021). This form of teaching requires relatively more reading and writing, which may be one of the reasons underlying the intergroup differences observed.…”

EU27 Higher Education Institutions and COVID-19, Year 2020

“…The focus of most articles is distance learning or the change from face-to-face to distance learning. There are several perspectives, like mobile learning methodology [34] and gamification [35], for a specific subject [36,37]; for a specific group of students, such as international mobility students [38] or first-year students [39]; concerned with the quality of educational process on online platforms [40], the level of communication of social responsibility by higher education institutions [41] or technical conditions of distance learning [42]; adaptation of the learning process [43], concern about connecting to the digital world [44][45][46]; the influence of some factors on students' acceptance of shifting education to distance learning [47], Evaluation of the Emotional and Cognitive Regulation [48], comparison of face-to-face classes with distance learning [49] by the student's perspective [50,51], teacher's perspective [43,52], organization [53], or various actors [54].…”

“…the sample size varies widely: from 100 or less [38,39,51], 250 or less [37,40,45,46,49,50,55], less than 1000 students [42,44,54], or more than 1000 [47,48]. Two studies use the General Extended Technology Acceptance Model for E-Learning (GETAMEL) [39,47], one study uses the Digital Citizenship Behavior Scale (DCB) [45] and another uses the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) [48]. One of the studies uses three surveys: at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the semester [35], while another compares student surveys in the semester prior to the pandemic with the surveys of students who participated in the course during the pandemic [49].…”

“…The results of the research indicated that the most important factors that influence the feelings of students and can convince them to change from teaching in the classroom to teaching in the distance learning model are the feeling of pleasure in this form of education and a sense of self-efficacy [39].…”

Healthcare student’s perception towards e-learning approach during COVID-19 pandemic: A study protocol

“…A questionnaire will be used to know the healthcare students' perceptions toward e-learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. 4. All responders will be given complete information about the study's goals.…”