Thai University Students' Perceptions of Online Education after Extended Period of Emergency Remote Education

Abstract

For over 2 years, the Covid-19 pandemic forced large numbers of Thai students to engage in emergency remote education, but with the pandemic abating and students returning to face-to-face classrooms, this paper takes the opportunity to examine students’ feelings about their experience with online education. The aims of this research are thus to investigate students’ perceptions of their university’s preparedness and its provision of ongoing support for online learning, the quality of the online teaching, the advantages and disadvantages of online classrooms, the students’ technological self-efficacy, and their preferred mode of learning when the pandemic abates. The results reveal that students’ overall satisfaction with the university’s preparedness and support was at the moderate level, while the quality of online teaching and students’ technological self-efficacy were rated at the high level. In terms of the advantages and disadvantages of online education, the latter outweighed the former. The students’ preferred mode of learning after the end of the pandemic was face-to-face classrooms, followed in order by blended learning, and then fully online classrooms. The findings suggest that factors including the lack of university life experiences, an absence of classroom interaction, health problems, and heavy workloads could hinder the adoption of fully online classrooms.