Abstract
As the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread all over the world, many educational institutions have shifted to a full-time online teaching mode. Although online teaching has been widely explored, the unprecedented initiatives of mass-scale full-time online education at the secondary school level are yet to be unravelled. By using a qualitative approach and drawing on the conceptualisation of learning engagement and Community of Inquire model as conceptual frameworks, this study explored how secondary school students in China engaged with online education during the COVID-19 pandemic and what factors influenced their sustainable online learning engagement. This research examined the perspectives of twenty-four students and five teachers through semi-structured interviews and observations of online classes. Findings indicate that the students’ online learning engagement involved three inter-related categories: emotional, cognitive and behavioural engagement. Contextual factors influencing the sustainability of students’ online learning engagement were identified by the participants, including teacher presence, parental involvement, and a supportive learning environment/community. The findings in this paper have implications for teacher development, family support and establishment of e-teaching platforms in emergency remote teaching for young students. Finally, the study puts forward best practices for the sustainable development of the emergency remote teaching in the future public crises.
Highlights
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread in early 2020 in China, the Chinese government has implemented strict social distancing measures in all domains of life
By using class observation and self-reports to access teachers’ and students’ practice in online classes, this study explored the way that the students engage emotionally, cognitively and behaviourally with online education during the COVID-19 pandemic, and elicited the contextual factors that influenced their sustainable online learning engagement
Students were required to attend those courses broadcasted on the China Education Television (CETV) following a given schedule [29]
Summary
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread in early 2020 in China, the Chinese government has implemented strict social distancing measures in all domains of life. On 4 February 2020 to sustain teaching online [1]. The essence of the policy was to use online methods to teach students who would otherwise be missing out on education. School leaders and teachers had to prepare for this online remote teaching at a very short notice. This unprecedented mass-scale online teaching was implemented in all levels of education—from primary schools to universities—from early February to July 2020 (the end of the Spring semester in China). Schools in 191 countries closed in the early period of the pandemic, affecting 91.3% of students’ study (around 1.5 billion students worldwide) [2]. In response to the school closures, online education was being implemented all over the world.
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