Abstract
The present study aims to determine the extent to which online learning (or e-learning) motivation during COVID-19 Pandemic for undergraduate students at Shiraz University in Shiraz, Iran. It also plans to compare students’ level of motivation for online learning, based on their gender and field of study. For these purposes, the researcher adopted a quantitative comparative research design, using a questionnaire which was developed and checked for internal consistency. The questionnaire was administered on 200 undergraduate students of civil engineering and psychology at Shiraz University. After the collected data were split by gender and field of study two independent samples t-tests were conducted to assess the significance of the results and to determine if there was a significant difference in their online learning motivation among the resulting groups for each independent variable. The research findings showed that undergraduate students are rather highly motivated to online learning regardless of their gender or field of study. No significant difference in online learning motivation between male and female university students was derived from the data analysis. However, in relation to field of study, it was found that the overall online learning motivation for civil engineering students was significantly higher than psychology students.
Highlights
Online learning is the employment of technology to aid and enhance learning
The discussion is presented and organized based on online learning motivation for undergraduate university students as the main variable of the study and the only common variable between this study and the other previous studies. 4.1 Online Learning Motivation for Undergraduate Students The results of this study present that implementing online learning for university students in the period of the Pandemic has been a force of law rather than a free choice and has come along with numerous tough challenges for students to set up the facilities and follow the lessons with limited amount of interaction with the instructor, the overall students have been motivated to online learning
As can be concluded from the results of this survey, undergraduate students of civil engineering were more motivated in online learning than their peers majoring in psychology
Summary
Online learning is the employment of technology to aid and enhance learning. It has its roots in distance education which started a few decades ago through globalization of technology and its impacts on all aspects of our life including education. Ally (2008) defines online learning as the use of the www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls. Based on the recent numerous research studies, university students, in turn, seem to have been encouraged by different aspects of online learning such the flexibility of the online courses or the amount of time that they can save through online classes which enable them to have more time for more favorite activities they might like to do or to pursuit the part-time careers they may be interested in (Rahman et al, 2021) They benefited from the high interaction that happened in the forms of virtual communication among teachers/students and students/students which resulted in vast capacity of sharing information and experience. The items mentioned in the questionnaire are all extrinsically driven motivatonal factors because the researcher believes that the online learning motivation that emerged after the COVID 19 Pandemic (and is discussed in this study) is by itself an external force of the current condition and not a choice of the students. Regarding the reliability of the questionnaire, an overall Cronbach’s alpha of .81 was obtained, revealing a high level of internal consistency of the piloted instrument
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