Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced millions of students to stay indoors and adapt to the new normal, namely distance learning at home, placing online learning in the spotlight. However, students’ motivation for online learning and its effectiveness in skill development during the COVID-19 pandemic has not been widely studied. This study examined the relationship between students’ fear of COVID-19 and students’ social presence in online learning while investigating the parallel mediating role of student psychological motivation and cognitive problem-solving skills related to online learning. The participants were 472 university students in Malaysia and Pakistan. An online data collection technique using Google Forms was employed. Faculty members of the universities were asked to share the survey with their students. Moreover, using a snowball sampling technique, students were requested to share the survey with their friends. SPSS Statistics (Version 21) was employed to do preliminary data analysis, AMOS (Version 21) software was used to conduct confirmatory factor analysis using a maximum likelihood estimation, and Hayes’ PROCESS model was used to examine proposed hypotheses. The results show that only cognitive problem solving mediates the relationship between fear of COVID-19 and students’ social presence in online learning in Malaysian samples. In Pakistan, cognitive problem solving and psychological motivation mediate the relationship between fear of COVID-19 and students’ social presence in online learning. The study found that developing cognitive problem-solving skills and providing psychological motivation could enhance their engagement with online learning.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the education industry due to the prevailing lockdown measures in some countries
Step 2 cognitive problem-solving skills (CPSS) regressed on Fear of COVID-19 (FCoV) Psychological motivation (PM) regressed on FCoV
Step 3 social presence in online learning (SPOL) regressed on CPSS SPOL regressed on PM
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the education industry due to the prevailing lockdown measures in some countries. Lockdown and movement restrictions have caused unprecedented challenges for students due to the abrupt transition to online learning. To capture the immediate economic effects of the pandemic, UK universities alone, for example, incurred an estimated cost of £790 million due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and universities resorted to online teaching and learning until the advent of a successful vaccine (Daniel, 2020). The pandemic has increased the importance of online teaching and learning in both developed (Dost et al, 2020) and developing countries (Dashtestani, 2020). This has resulted in a pedagogical shift to increase students’ psychological motivation and cognitive problem-solving skills (CPSS) in order to improve sustainable engagement in online learning (Lee et al, 2019). Students with a higher perceived social presence in an online environment experience a greater degree of learning satisfaction and engagement (Grieve et al, 2016)
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