Investigating Students' Perceptions of Their Learning Experience and Self-Regulated Learning Skills During Emergency Remote Teaching

Introduction

The global COVID-19 outbreak has had an unprecedented impact on education systems worldwide. International responses to this public health crisis have varied and have been, for the most part, reactionary. Given the rapidly evolving nature of the outbreak, higher education institutions are having to adapt their responses continually with little to no clarity on the length of time that measures/limitations will need to be in place. The solutions implemented thus far can generally be categorized as educational policy solutions by ordering mass closures of academic institutions and structural solutions through the transition to distance learning supporting infrastructure and addressing the needs of stakeholders including students, educators, parents, and education leaders to ensure the availability and accessibility of distance learning.

Global responses to the outbreak have been proportional to the impacts observed to date, and include national school closures in 188 countries, thus affecting over 1.5 billion students or over 89% of the world’s student population (UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank, &OECD, 2021). Under these unexpected circumstances, teachers and students have had to quickly adapt to this new rapid and forced adoption of online teaching and learning. This rapid shift to fully online learning environments created a challenging situation for students who were new to this method of teaching and learning. Additionally, the sudden transition during unexpected outbreak caused stressful learning conditions for students, due to the Pandemic conditions’ uncertainties. This academic situation required substantial efforts from students to continue their education through high autonomy.

Learner autonomy indicates how learners can be metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in their own learning process (Zimmerman, 2001; Zimmerman & Schunk, 2011). Further, learner autonomy can be affected by the course structure as well as by the extent to which learners are able to control the learning process (Giossos, Koutsouba,Lionarakis, Skavantzos, 2009). Indeed, course transactional distance can be evaluated based on the characteristics of learners’ autonomy level (Kanuka et al., 2002) which enhances their self-regulated learning (SRL) skills. From a metacognitive perspective, SRL refers to the cyclical processes of understanding the required task, developing a plan, implementing strategies to satisfy task requirements, and monitoring the effectiveness of those strategies. However, there is a lack of studies on the impact of SRL on students in digital environments (Pérez-Álvarez et al., 2018), while research in this field is highly needed to facilitate the shift to online education in emergency conditions (Hodges et al., 2020). Emergency remote teaching (ERT) is a temporary shift of education to an alternate and unplanned online distance delivery mode due to crisis circumstance. This shift to ERT required students to take full control of their learning, employ motivational and SRL strategies more extensively, and effectively strategize the learning process to succeed academically (Hodges et al., 2020).