Exploring Students’ Factors in Online Teaching during COVID-19 Lockdown from their Lecturers’ Viewpoint and Perspectives

Abstract

The global community is currently harnessing the lessons learnt from the COVID-19 Education response, to build more resilient education systems. This can effectively be achieved via empirical evidence of the experiences of all stakeholders in education in all nations during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. The purpose of this study was to explore student factors in the lecturers’ experience of their online emergency remote teaching (ERT) in the College of Education, Agbor, Delta State, Nigeria during the COVID-19 lockdown. Using a quantitative descriptive design, the lecturers completed a structured questionnaire about their online ERT experiences. The findings suggest that generally, the students chose the familiar WhatsApp (chat and voice) messaging as against the use of zoom and other platforms for the ERT. Top students’ challenges are:

• unpreparedness for the ERT.
• experience of unavailable/unstable network/internet access and
• inability to purchase enough data.

In addition, students lacked:

• smart phones/laptops/computers,
• necessary ICT skills, and
  • did not embrace the ERT, although it engaged them academically during the lockdown.

Based on these results and in view of prevalent/imminent lockdown due to emerging new variants of the COVID-19 such as delta and omicron, interventions/strategies for achieving successful and satisfactory online teaching are recommended.