COVID-19 and online teaching: mainland Chinese students encounter Taiwanese teachers

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has transferred university lecture to online teaching around the world. In Taiwan, a blended mode of online teaching, specifically serving overseas mainland Chinese students was applied. Meanwhile, the China factor, which refers to the Chinese government exporting self-censorship to other countries, was amplified during the pandemic, because of their tightening of ideological control. In order to examine the role of China factor in the process of online teaching in Taiwan, concepts such as perceived privacy risk, digital competence, identity disruption, fear of negative evaluation and self-censorship have been integrated with the theoretical framework. An online survey targeting lecturers has been conducted and confirmed the influence of the China factor. Meanwhile, perceived privacy risk and identity disruption positively influenced the level of fear of negative evaluation. Fear of negative evaluation is positively associated with the level of self-censorship. Discussions and implications were developed.

KEYWORDS:

• The China factor
• online teaching
• fear of negative evaluation
• self-censorship
• perceived privacy risk
• identity disruption

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2024.2314018

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Science and Technology Council [110-2410-H-034 -026 -MY2].