Emergency forced pandemic e-learning – feedback from students for HEI management

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic created many challenges for higher education institutions (HEI), one of the most important being forced e-learning – the involuntary need to move all educational activities to an online environment. In this exploratory study, we aim to learn from students’ feedback on demands created by COVID-19 forced e-learning to provide HEI management with insights helpful in building educational policies that might promote students’ positive perception of distance learning in turbulent times. Based on a convenience sample of more than 600 university students we implemented multiple regression analysis to explore the relationships between e-learning demands experienced by students and the three dimensions of e-learning perception: emotional experience with e-learning, cognitive evaluation of e-learning, and study engagement in e-learning. Our findings have shown that the e-learning demand most strongly related to a negative perception of e-learning was students’ belief that during e-learning the university was plunged into chaos. This suggests that for students who participate in e-learning, the most important aspect of e-learning policy might be not, as we often intuitively think, the cutting edge e-learning platform & technology but rather effective reciprocal communication between HEI and students about the e-learning situation, allowing a perception of order to be created.

KEYWORDS:

• Forced e-learning
• blended-learning
• Covid-19
• emergency e-learning
• HEI management

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Konrad Kulikowski

Konrad Kulikowski is a PhD at University of Social Sciences, Poland. His research interests concern performance management in HEIs, Organizational Psychology and Applied Psychology.

Sylwia Przytula

Sylwia Przytuła is an Associate Professor at Wroclaw University of Economics & Business, Poland. Her research interests are on international human resource management, global mobility and migration and expatriation of academics. 

Lukasz Sulkowski

Łukasz Sułkowski is a Professor of Social Sciences at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. His current research focus is on higher education institutions, public management, strategic management in a public sector context, epistemology and methodology in management sciences.