Due to the COVID-19 pandemic-related lockdown, first-year university students have had limited opportunity to interact in person with peers and the larger university community. The mandated lockdown compelled universities to move to emergency remote teaching. This move led to an onslaught of epistemological, psychosocial, emotional, and economic obstacles for many first-year students. It is against this background that this chapter explores the affordances and challenges that first-year students at a university in Johannesburg, South Africa encountered with online learning. These experiences will serve as the foundation for a discussion of the types of pedagogical approaches that should be used in the future with first-year students.
TopBackground
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has dramatically changed our world (Grange, 2020). The pandemic has had a huge impact on the education system both locally and internationally (Daniel, 2020). The outbreak was first discovered in December 2019 in Wuhan, China (Omrani, 2020; Pokhrel & Chhetri, 2021). It is believed that the virus started to spread in China during December 2019, before moving to Thailand, Japan, the Republic of Korea, then to the United States, Vietnam, Singapore, and, at the end of January 2020, to Australia, Nepal, Europe, Malaysia, Canada, the Middle East, and other countries of the Western Pacific Region and South-East Asia Region, and onwards to Russia, Africa, and Latin America (Aristovnik, Keržič, Ravšelj, Tomaževič, & Umek, 2020). This led to countries around the world taking precautions to avoid the spread of the virus. One such strategy was a mandated lockdown and social distancing (Alfano & Ercolano, 2020) in order to control the transmission of the disease. Countries opted for various periods of lockdown with Austria, Portugal and Sweden having shorter periods of about 15 days and France, Italy and Spain for about 60 days (Coccia, 2021). The South African government attempted to control the spread of COVID-19 by also enforcing a mandated lockdown and prohibiting public gatherings, enforced social distancing and closing of schools and universities (Dube, 2020).