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Adults used to be the largest online student population before the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the number of online students multiplied during the pandemic, and now includes the complete conglomeration of all student groups. Due to their longer experience of online education, adult students continue to provide valuable insights on how to enhance online learning for other higher education students. This article reports the results of phenomenographic research on the qualitative differences in the ways of experiencing learning by fifteen adult students enrolled in two online postgraduate programmes. The analysis on in-depth, participant-led interviews demonstrated that online learning is conceptualised in three ways: as an investment, as a process that brings structure, and as a process that enables and empowers an individual. The results of this study are of particular importance for those who are concerned with introducing online learning to the higher education curricula. The paper argues that the stigma of online education being the second choice, maintained in the educational research literature, should be replaced by a holistic approach to education as a process that organically incorporates the online educational elements into higher education. Focusing on how adult students experience online learning provides a broader and deeper understanding of adopted effective practices and the variety of online learning opportunities and outcomes for other students' groups. Insights based on the results of this study are summarised. © 2024, Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education. All rights reserved.
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The coronavirus pandemic has led to major changes in higher education around the world. Higher education institutions (HEIs) moved to completely online learning and a range of new technologies including online videoconferencing and chat tools. Research has shown that users have privacy and security concerns about such tools, but little is known about the attitudes of HEI students to these issues, apart from reluctance to use webcams during online teaching. A survey of 71 UK HEI students explored attitudes and concerns about privacy and security in online teaching in the pandemic. Participants knew little about institutional policies on these issues and few had had any training. Ratings of concern across a range of issues were generally low, however in open-ended questions, a range of concerns such as being recorded without permission, unauthorised people entering and disrupting of online sessions, not knowing where recordings are stored and who has access to them. The main concerns about online teaching situations related to being monitored in examinations. HEIs moved very rapidly to deploy online technologies for teaching in response to the pandemic, but going forward, more transparency and information to students could alleviate many of these concerns and create better informed students. Copyright © 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
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United States historians have recorded the Covid-19 pandemic as one of the major events of 2020. The Spring 2020 session was an unprecedented time for institutions of higher education. The traditional model of higher education was supplanted by digital online modality for delivery of curriculum, not only in order to finish the Spring 2020 semester, but to carry the universities forward all the way through the Summer 2021 semester. During March 2020, a predominant majority of universities and colleges transitioned to online modality within the span of days. This accelerated transition, coupled with the already existing strategy of using online education to fill enrollment gaps, and the class action lawsuits filed by students around quality and cost during the pandemic, clearly highlighted the potential and gaps in strategic plans and investments around online education delivery. This case study of a public doctoral university with very high research activity (R1), reviewed cases that demonstrated how state policies influenced an online education strategy and, subsequently, explored the strategic planning processes for online programs in this University. The case study further illustrates how the strategic planning process influenced the level of investments in support of online education programs. In summary, the findings of this holistic single case study highlight the purposeful, focused, prioritized energy necessary to deliver an online program, equally commensurate with the quality and experience of brick and mortar institutions, with a clear and singularly aligned goal of quality and affordable access via all administrators, faculty, and departments involved in the process. The findings concluded that the influence of the State was pivotal in setting the goal of affordable access and quality, along with funding incentives designed to drive the execution of the online education strategy and the strategic plan at this public R1 university. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
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Student persistence in the first year of studies is a crucial concern in online higher education. Recent accelerated growth in online programs due to the COVID pandemic has increased concerns over higher dropout rates, which are often connected to students’ time challenges—time poverty, juggling multiple commitments, and fitting studies into busy lives. However, research seldom focuses on students’ perceptions of time issues related to persistence. This study addresses this gap by exploring how 20 second-year students retrospectively viewed their experiences of time challenges and how they impacted their persistence in their first year at an online open university. Content analysis of in-depth interviews demonstrated that time pressure and time-conflicts were crucial barriers for success in the foundational semester;the main barrier was juggling study with multiple priorities. Most persisters had good time management and high levels of intrinsic motivation, satisfaction, and self-determination. However, even procrastinators with heavy work-family duties managed to persevere due to their resilience and personal motivation. Lastly, recommendations and strategies for effective student-based interventions to foster persistence are suggested.
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Monitoring student attendance and engagement is common practice during undergraduate courses at university. Attendance data typically show a strong positive relationship with student performance and regular monitoring is an important tool to identify students who may require additional academic provisions, wellbeing support and pastoral care, for example. However, most of the previous studies and our framework for monitoring attendance and engagement is based on traditional on-campus, in-person delivery. Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, our transition to online teaching delivery requires us to re-evaluate what constitutes attendance and engagement in a purely online setting and what are the most accurate ways of monitoring. Here, I show how statistics derived from student interaction with a virtual learning environment, Canvas, can be used as a monitoring tool. I show how basic statistics such as the number and frequency of page views are not adequate and do not correlate with student performance. A more in-depth analysis of video viewing duration, rather than simple page clicks/views is required, and weakly correlates with student performance. Lastly, I provide a discussion of the potential pitfalls and advantages of collecting such data and provide a perspective on some of the associated challenges.
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The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a great disruptor which has challenged established practice and experience of risk and change management, while presenting significant opportunities to accelerate proposed change and develop new innovations for the future of learning and knowledge dissemination. To this point, the development and uptake of online higher education (HE) has been slow and not particularly progressive, held back in part by a resistance from traditional HE institutions to disrupt their current business model, which is heavily reliant on the long-term residential attendance of students at costly physical premises. However, the imperative of moving quickly to online and blended learning as a result of the pandemic is now challenging deeply held sector beliefs and approaches to the delivery of higher education. With the continued expansion of student numbers and the escalation of costs to both the student and the taxpayer, the previous static model of HE no longer makes sense, especially in a world where young people do everything else online-play, consume, form relationships, shop, socialize and, yes, learn, albeit mostly in an unstructured way. The opportunity is now there to understand the potential of the current practical shift to online and blended learning, to turn it into a lasting cultural shift by “normalizing” this delivery method, and to develop new, flexible and better value forms of high-quality HE provision, whether face to face, blended, or pure online. © 2021 David Baker and Lucy Ellis Published by Elsevier Ltd.
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The existing steady and continual rise of online learning in higher education has been accelerated by COVID-19 and resulted in a move away from solely on-campus teaching. Prior to the pandemic, online education was providing higher education to students who were returning to study to up-skill, are employed full-time, caring for family members, living rurally or remotely and/or for whom otherwise face-to-face campus learning was not a preference or option. To understand how we can better support online students in their unique circumstances and create an optimal learning environment, we must understand the factors associated with academic achievement within an online setting. This systematic review involved a search of relevant databases published between January 2009 and May 2021 examining factors and constructs related to academic performance in online higher education settings. Across 34 papers, 23 (67.6%) explored factors and constructs related to student characteristics including cognitive and psychological, demographic, university enrolment, and prior academic performance. Twenty-one (61.8%) papers explored learning environment factors including engagement, student experience, course design, and instructor. Our overall synthesis of findings indicates that academic performance in online learning is most strongly associated with motivation (including self-efficacy), and self-regulation. We propose three main implications of our review for online learning stakeholders such as educators and designers. Firstly, we argue that the wellbeing of online learners is important to understand, and future research should explore its impact on students’ experience and success in online higher education. Secondly, we emphasise the importance of developing and designing online courses utilising relevant frameworks and evidence-based principles. Finally, we propose an approach to promoting improved student cognitive and psychosocial experiences (such as self-efficacy, self-regulation, and perceived support) could be achieved by creating and incorporating an online learning orientation module at the commencement of enrolment. Systematic Review Registration: (website), identifier (registration number). Copyright © 2022 Chung, McKenzie, Schweinsberg and Mundy.
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The global pandemic has accelerated the ‘move online’ of higher education in Indonesia. This study aimed to examine the relationship between Indonesian students’ experiences of studying online, their epistemological beliefs and their beliefs about fun in learning. A mixed method approach was used to examine this relationship in a sample of 774 students. A Principal component analysis (PCA) of questionnaire responses identified associations between social constructivist beliefs about learning and the centrality of fun in learning. The PCA was considered together with a thematic analysis of an open question ‘Has the COVID-19 situation changed your feelings about online study?’ This revealed the significance of the epistemic mismatch between many students’ beliefs and the transmissive online pedagogy that they described. This mismatch is implicated as a factor in understanding the students largely negative experiences of online study and the impact on their well-being, albeit within the context of a pandemic. This is the first time that this link has been proposed. The research indicates that examining students’ epistemological beliefs can offer insights that are helpful in understanding students’ educational engagement and well-being when studying online. © 2021, The International Academic Forum (IAFOR). All rights reserved.
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This paper aimed to provide a holistic view of research that investigated online learning in higher education around the globe during COVID-19 utilizing a bibliometric analysis. The researchers used co-citation analysis and text mining afforded by VOSviewer to document and analyze research patterns and topics reported in peer-reviewed documents published between January 2020 and August 2021. Findings of this study indicated that scholars from 103 countries or regions from the Global North and Global South investigated a wide array of topics, such as use of various technologies and strategies, redesigned curriculum, student perceptions and psychological impacts of the pandemic-imposed online learning. Many researchers applied technology acceptance theories and structural equation modeling to investigate factors associated with adoption and impacts of the pandemic-imposed online learning. Of the large quantity of research, medical education and chemical education were the most investigated disciplines. Inquiry-based learning, discovery learning, hands-on learning and collaborative learning emerged as instructional approaches frequently discussed or utilized across the target studies. This paper discussed (a) ongoing and emerging challenges to online higher education, (b) placing innovative pedagogies at the forefront of online learning, and (c) rapid, but imbalanced distribution of evolving literature based on the findings.
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Flexibility is typical of open universities and their e-learning designs. While this constitutes their main attraction, promising learners will be able to study "anytime, anyplace," this also demands more selfregulation and engagement, a cause for student dropout. This case study explores professors' experiences of flexibility in e-learning design and continuous assessment and their perception of the risks and opportunities that more flexibility implies for student persistence and dropout. In-depth interviews with 18 full professors, who are the e-learning designers of undergraduate courses at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), were analyzed, employing qualitative content analysis. According to the professors, the main causes for dropout are student-centered, yet they are connected to learning design: workload and time availability, as well as students' expectations, profiles, and time management skills. In the professors' view, flexibility has both positive and negative effects. Some are conducive to engagement and persistence: improvement of personalized feedback, formative assessment, and module workload. Others generate resistance: more flexibility may increase workload, procrastination, dropout, and risk of losing professorial control, and may threaten educational standards and quality. Untangling the tensions between dropout and flexibility may enhance learning design and educational practices that help prevent student dropout. Stakeholders should focus on measures perceived as positive, such as assessment extension, personalized feedback and monitoring, and course workload calibration. As higher education is globally turning to online delivery due to the COVID-19 viral pandemic, such findings may be useful in both hybrid and fully online educational contexts.