Discrepancy between language learners and teachers concerns about emergency remote teaching

Abstract

Emergency remote teaching refers to the unanticipated, involuntary shift to a virtual learning environment due to, for example, a natural disaster or political instability. The sudden nature of this transition creates additional challenges to effective learning. In this article, we investigate one such challenge, namely the potential for teacher–student miscommunication. We report on a study involving 674 language learners and 61 language teachers. The participants were asked to rate a number of education‐related ١problems that could potentially arise in the context of emergency remote teaching. Learners rated these concerns in terms of the extent to which they had actually experienced them, while teachers were asked to rate the extent to which they perceived these to be concerns for their students. The results showed that teachers believed that students required additional training on using learning management systems, that students did not take online teaching seriously, and that emergency remote teaching would encourage students to cheat. Students disagreed with these statements (ds = 0.53–0.65). We discuss the implications of these teacher–learner discrepancies in light of the need for explicit guidelines and clearer expectations of students during online learning and assessment.

Tracking Saudi EFL Students’ Reflections of Online Learning During Coronavirus: Different Rounds

“…On the other hand, studies about ERT are still growing because it is the first time in history to have a long emergency shift to distance learning. Moreover, some recent studies about ERT showed that most courses and plans were not well developed (Hakami, 2020;Johnson, Veletsianos, & Seaman, 2020;Al Shlowiy et al, 2021). Therefore, this study attempted to fill in the gap by focusing on the acceptance and perceptions of ERT for a long time that includes three semesters.…”

“…Although there are benefits of online learning systems, research shows some issues, such as the issues of internet connection (Alshehri & Cumming, 2020), personal devices issues (Hakami, 2020), students' privacy issues (Sharma, 2019), screen issues (Oyaid & Alshaya, 2019), and technical issues (Al Shlowiy et al, 2021). Moreover, some teachers have negative perceptions of using online learning so that they do not effectively employ its methods in their teaching experiences.…”

“…On the other hand, students have different perceptions of using online learning depending on their teachers' utilization of LMS (Bousbahi & Alrazgan, 2015). Although they enjoy the convenience of the online learning system, they generally prefer the face-to-face learning environments more than the online learning environments (Al Shlowiy et al, 2021), especially if they cannot exchange ideas, boost their skills, and increase their knowledge. In some online learning environments, students only perform the minimum requirement for achieving the scores (Kite et al, 2020) because the online platforms are used as a digital syllabus or as storage places for digital resources (Yuen, Deng, Fox, & Tavares, 2009).…”

“…Therefore, most students preferred traditional face-to-face learning rather than virtual learning although they recognized the flexibility of online learning that could go smoothly with any commitment. Such a preference of the superiority of face-to-face education might rely on a belief that direct interaction between students and teachers is difficult in an online environment (Al Shlowiy et al, 2021).…”

“…2018). However, such a rapid shift had affected the quality of the online educational process and confused the entire society for several months (Al Shlowiy et al,. 2021).…”