EXPLORING UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ RESPONSES TO AND EXPECTATIONS OF EMERGENCY REMOTE TEACHING DURING COVID-19

Abstract

The recent Covid-19 pandemic has forced many educational institutions across the globe to transition to e-learning, adopting Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) for the majority of classes and courses. This situation created an opportunity for research into how emergencies affected student learning, particularly with student expectations during ERT as the basis. Therefore, this qualitative thematic study focused on understanding how student expectations influenced the construction and interpretation of students’ behaviours, feelings and perspectives during ERT following the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework. Twenty in-depth interviews with National University of Singapore (NUS) undergraduates from different faculties were conducted, initial coding used for identifying themes and patterns for thematic analysis. This study’s results showed that students’ expectations about participation, instructor ability and learning process influenced how they interacted with peers and instructors, their perception of instructor presence and their satisfaction with ERT. Expectations of negative experiences and home environment were also brought up, which did not fit easily into the CoI framework. The emergency and crisis aspect of ERT might have created different expectations of learning, which could be a prominent differentiating factor from previous CoI findings. These insights can help further research on e-learning, ERT and CoI, and propose better online curriculums and teaching methods for ERT in preparation for future crises like COVID-19.