Making Sense of Teaching and Learning During the COVID 19 Pandemic: Studying Online at Home in Isolation

Abstract

This paper is about online education during the COVID 19 pandemic. More particularly, it is about exploring how university students make sense of their online teaching and learning practices during the COVID 19 pandemic. In order to discover their sense-making practices, this study investigates how a group of freshman students in a public university experience online education, focusing on their routine interactions with it. Between October 2020 and January 2021, the study collects the data from 165 freshman students. 133 participants take part in the first stage, describing their initial experiences with online education in a one-page note, in the second stage 25 participants talking about those experiences in semi-structured interviews, in the third stage 89 responding to the online survey, and 7 sending feedback for the draft report in the last stage. The data from those four sources are presented in four sections: (1) the participants’ routines with online education, (2) the benefits and (3) the disadvantages of online education according to their online practices, and (4) the students’ suggestions to improve the quality of online learning. A closer look on the findings suggests that the sudden massive transition to online education due to the COVID 19 outbreak results in both some advantages and some unforeseen undesirable consequences, one of which is the common confusion among the students that online education lacks socialization opportunities or unfair access to resources.