Face-to-Face and Remote Learning During the Confinement Due to Covid19: The Experience of Higher Education Students

Abstract

Due to COVID19 disease contingencies, in several countries, universities were forced to replace the face-to-face classes for a non-face-to-face system, also called as Emergency Remote Teaching - ERT. In this scenario, both teachers and students experienced several challenges and had to adapt to new ways of teaching and learning. The goal of this study was to understand how students experienced this situation. Through a qualitative methodology, we interviewed eight higher education students from social sciences scientific areas. Thematic analysis was used to identify and interpret patterns and themes in students’ responses. Results show that students experimented several difficulties at different levels: cognitive level (e.g., attention, concentration, and information storage), motivational (e.g., demotivation to study), tiredness; organizational (e.g., time and tasks management), and social level (e.g., interpersonal relationship and lack of contact with people). These results bring new knowledge to this problematic area and can be useful for students, teachers, and higher education institutions.

The Experiences of University Students in Non-Face-to-Face Classes During the Covid19 Pandemic – A Phenomenographic Perspective

“…In the same way, Leal and Chaleta (2020) had researched the difficulties of higher education students during the first confinement. Students felt difficulties in several levels: the cognitive level (difficulty in paying attention, maintaining concentration and information storage); the motivational level (to achieve a good performance on tasks); tiredness; organizational level (time and task management of study and learning); social level (interpersonal relationships and missing of contact with others) and difficulties in dealing with different papers (being a student at home and at the same time, to be a son, daughter, sister or brother).…”

“…According to Leal and Chaleta (2020), this situation brought the necessity of responding to 3 kinds of needs: the need of adapting to the confinement and to the social distancing imposed by authorities; the need of get used to the virtual classes system; and the need of acquiring or develop technological competencies to adopt to the classes in an online system with all underlying variables like new software, platforms, and applications.…”

“…In an immediate and spontaneous way, a lot of researchers did worry in comprehend the difficulties experimented by higher education students when adapting to this system (Ismailli, 2021;Leal & Chaleta, 2020;Shahbaz, Ashraf, Zakar, Fischer & Zakar, 2021). Shahbaz and collaborators (2021) conducted a phenomenographic study to understand the way how students have perceived the COVID19 and the implemented confinement.…”