Student Learning and Purchasing Behaviour Change During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Introduction

Humanity resides on mother earth with ambitious goals to mitigate unprecedented social, economic, and environmental challenges. Education, science, technology, and innovation play a huge role in managing these unthinkable challenges. Education can usher economic change and improve living conditions by increasing productivity, reducing social inequality, and helping to raise living standards. The higher education system is a complex entity that requires many objectivities and levels of analysis to understand its purpose, dynamics, and actors' interactions. In particular, it concerns technological innovations to facilitate courses and improve teaching and learning. Technology provides an essential avenue for enhancing a course delivering a more comprehensive student community. One of the essential constituents of efficient education delivery is the technology and extraordinary change in its breadth, pace, and depth of causal sequence. Accomplishing that breakthrough is the assured path for human society to bring enthusiastic peace, people, and prosperity standards. Thus, a buoyant education delivery system can accept and convert itself in the face of calamity.

Human society's calamity can take place in different forms and shapes. For example, the international health pandemic (i.e., coronavirus) has casted a bitter light on the susceptibility and challenges humanity faces in recent decades. It has highlighted an analysis of current inequalities and a picture of what steps forward requires taking, primarily among them appreciation the education of billions of students whose daily life and learning has been affected due to academic institutions closures wholly or delivered online teaching to provide moderately the students require.

The epidemic of coronavirus (known as COVID-19) at the end of 2019 forced governments to take invasive measures to prevent the spread of the disease, including closures of educational institutions. The rapid spread of the virus precluded careful, in-depth policy planning. In order to contain the virus, policies were implemented before their positive and negative effects were assessed. Only recently, policymakers have started inquiring into the consequences of various forms of academic institutions (e.g., school, college, university) closures to be better prepared to tackle a similar crisis in the future. While this “unprecedented multidimensional crisis demands coherent policy responses,” admittedly, not all countries have developed such comprehensive plans in place (Gouedard et al., 2020).

The coronavirus pandemic has adversely affected higher education daily activities worldwide, with face-to-face teaching and learning practices and student assessment styles being changed or cancelled due to the lockdown imposed by governments. Most educational institutions have also struggled with digital teaching delivery challenges (Talidong & Toquero, 2020). Higher education institutions were asked to formulate crisis management strategies to continue teaching and learning activities. For example, the United Kingdom government requested fellow citizens to minimize social contact as much as possible and went on to advise that “you can still work, but we are asking as many as possible to work from home” (BBC, 2020). Subsequently, face-to-face teaching was stopped for higher education institutions worldwide, with academics and teachers asked to formulate alternative student-support activities as replacements for attendance at lectures, tutorials, laboratory sessions, workshops, and seminars. In addition, the teaching and learning activities were altered due to an overhaul of planned assessment processes. As the coronavirus pandemic threat has developed further, the rapidly changing nature of communication provided to students and educators (e.g., academic, teacher) may have added additional sources of anxiety and pressure. In addition, mental, psychological, and emotional pressures became part of student and educator life. Finally, an early study highlights that the students are now at risk of being left behind the health and wellbeing during a formative stage of learning, the opportunity for appropriate education, personal development, and economic benefits (United Nations, 2020).