COVID-19 and the Impact on the UK's HEI Students From an Imposed Virtual Learning Environment

Introduction And Background

In January 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infection as a public health emergency (WHO, 2020). The pandemic that followed led to the closure of educational institutions across the world and fundamentally changed the education of millions of students (Azorín, 2020; Cao et al., 2020; Majanja, 2020; Peterson et al., 2020), including those in the UK (Watermeyer et al., 2020). In dealing with this emergency and the impact of the closures, the UK’s universities were forced to move rapidly from traditional methods, and instead turn to online learning platforms and video conferencing facilities to deliver their educational output. The pandemic brought a digital revolution to the higher education system, with online lectures, teleconferencing, digital books, online examinations and assessments, and interaction using virtual environments now commonplace. These events were unexpected and therefore could not have been pre-empted or pre-planned. This study considers the impact of these changes on the student body and attempts to assess student perspectives on the imposed digital transition on the delivery of LTA (Learning, Teaching and Assessment). The pandemic has challenged everything in its path, bringing uncertainties and fears for students and academics, and resulted in authorities ordering lockdowns and adopting social distancing measures to counter the effects of the virus (Azorín, 2020). Students, academics, and information technology interactions have been fascinating and characterised by major challenges (Almaiah et al., 2020). With millions of global citizens isolated in their homes for much of the time, frustrations were strongly felt by all age groups and all socio-economic groups, and students featured strongly in this regard (Baloran, 2020).

Although only nine months have elapsed since the declaration of COVID‐19 as a pandemic, many research and case reports have already been published in major international scientific journals, particularly in relation to educational institutions, with publications from China and US (Code et al., 2020; Greenhow & Galvin, 2020; Justis et al., 2020; Peterson et al., 2020), and various other countries (Abdulrahim & Mabrouk, 2020; Cao et al., 2020; Hendal, 2020; Mailizar et al., 2020; Mehta & Wang, 2020; Raaper & Brown, 2020), focusing on COVID‐19’s impact on educational institutions and predicting post-COVID‐19 developments in the education sector. Many of these reports have attempted to answer important questions, including how e-learning will evolve, what the likely outcomes will be, and what they will bring. Both COVID-19’s potential impact on the educational institutional marketplace, and the clinical and post-lockdown perspectives for individual educational institutions need to be investigated further as these are likely to have long-lasting implications from education. Therefore, an understanding of teaching-learning issues during the crisis is crucial if educational providers are to find successful LTA strategies for the smooth running of a virtual LTA environment. Given this backdrop, the present study aims (by reference to the academic year 2019/20) to identify issues faced by students resulting from the imposition of a virtual learning environment-based education, which suddenly replaced traditional LTA methods students faced at the start of their academic year. To achieve this aim, the study attempts to identify the challenges which UK undergraduate and postgraduate students faced as a result of COVID-19’s interruption to their education and to provide recommendations on how universities and other educational providers can learn from the student experience, manage the academic year 2020/21 and prepare for any future interruptions more effectively. It utilizes the opinions and recommendations made by the students who participated in the questionnaire and attempts to evaluate these recommendations.

To date, there is limited evidence of research in this area from a UK HEI context (Watermeyer et al., 2020). This study aims to add to existing research by making contributions that offer a fresh debate on the LTA issues facing UK university students and by examining the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the student learning experience within UK higher education (HE) establishments. It offers a perspective from the student community on how UK universities, can deal effectively with the issues they identified as being key to the success of online LTA strategies.