E‐learning has been adopted as the alternative learning mode across the board during COVID‐ 19 pandemic to persist academic activities due to nationwide closures. Self-efficacy plays a mediated role in and is positively correlated with academic achievements of distance education. Objective factors (online connection, online learning experience and knowledge, online classroom environment, and others) and subjective factors (learning attitudes of students, interaction among students, online teaching capability of teachers, emotion and psychological states and others), influence by and large self-efficacy of learners who conduct online education. Additionally, different measurements of self-efficacy are discussed, with the result that Questionnaire of English Self-Efficacy (QESE) is a professional and valid tool to measure self-efficacy of English-major learners. There is such a paucity of studying learners’ self-efficacy via e-learning that this paper fills the gap to study the topic.