Undergraduate students’ experience of emergency online learning and its challenges

Abstract

One consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic was emergency online learning leading to extensive research worldwide to identify its challenges from the perspective of students. However, there is still room for a more in-depth analytical framework to understand how the students felt about and perceived it. Drawing upon Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor theory, this paper explores the ‘metaphorical representation’ of a group of undergraduate students’ experiences at a Malaysian university via a semi-structured interview. There were 57 participants. The obtained data were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively using Braun & Clarke’s thematic analysis as well as MAXQDA Software. The findings reveal five main challenges due to the five changes brought about by emergency online learning in terms of ‘learning environment, class assignments, interaction, information delivery, and lecturer/student role’. Finally, this paper ends with suggestions to address the identified challenges as well as making recommendations for future research.

Keywords: Adult learning; COVID-19; metaphor analysis; online learning; remote teaching.