Exploring Students’ Factors in Online Teaching during COVID-19 Lockdown from their Lecturers’ Viewpoint and Perspectives

Egede, B A J (Ph.D),Awuja S A (Ph.D)

doi:10.22158/fet.v4n4p59

Abstract

The global community is currently harnessing the lessons learnt from the COVID-19 Education response, to build more resilient education systems. This can effectively be achieved via empirical evidence of the experiences of all stakeholders in education in all nations during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. The purpose of this study was to explore student factors in the lecturers’ experience of their online emergency remote teaching (ERT) in the College of Education, Agbor, Delta State, Nigeria during the COVID-19 lockdown. Using a quantitative descriptive design, the lecturers completed a structured questionnaire about their online ERT experiences. The findings suggest that generally, the students chose the familiar WhatsApp (chat and voice) messaging as against the use of zoom and other platforms for the ERT. Top students’ challenges are:unpreparedness for the ERT.experience of unavailable/unstable network/internet access andinability to purchase enough data.In addition, students lacked:smart phones/laptops/computers,necessary ICT skills, anddid not embrace the ERT, although it engaged them academically during the lockdown.Based on these results and in view of prevalent/imminent lockdown due to emerging new variants of the COVID-19 such as delta and omicron, interventions/strategies for achieving successful and satisfactory online teaching are recommended.

Highlights

The global community is currently addressing and harnessing the lessons learnt for education from the COVID-19 pandemic to develop more resilient education systems (OECD, 2020)
This result is contrary to that of Amuda and Ajani (2021) which established that the use of Zoom application for online presentation was prominent among researchers in Nigerian Library School, and that of Okeji and Alex-Nmecha (2021) which showed that Zoom was used by lecturers in the department of Library and Information Science (LIS) of some Nigerian Universities
Students already had WhatsApp groups in their various departments and were required to form similar groups for the various courses for the online teaching. This accounts for the popular choice of these platforms as found in this study. This result is in line with those of Iseolorunkanmi et al (2021), that WhatsApp was used in Nigerian Universities for emergency remote teaching (ERT), and the previous study (Egede, 2021) which showed that lecturers perceived that they could use it to teach online during the lockdown

Summary

Introduction

The global community is currently addressing and harnessing the lessons learnt for education from the COVID-19 pandemic to develop more resilient education systems (OECD, 2020). Research has shown that students’ descriptions of their experiences with the COVID-19 induced online teaching and learning in higher education ranged from satisfaction and high performance (WEFORUM, 2020; Craig, 2021) to high dissatisfaction and poor performance (Selvanathan et al, 2020; Almendingen et al, 2021; Eidan et al, 2021). These two different polarities of experiences depend largely on the variables influencing the online teaching and learning processes in the institutions/environments. A follow-up study: The COVID-19 induced online teaching experience in the College of Education, Agbor

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