Almost all countries responded to COVID-19 with the school lockdown which happened overnight. As the lockdown continued, some students' distress became more evident. To know how to deal with such cases in the future, the authors conducted qualitative research among second-year business students who finished their secondary education at the time of the first epidemic wave and came to university in the second epidemic wave. For some students, the transition from secondary to tertiary education is a severe challenge even without the lockdown; not all students responded to the lockdown similarly. Some of them found remote teaching even more interesting; they were more motivated and concentrated on schoolwork when they studied in a quiet, safe home environment. During the epidemic, students developed some new skills that they found valuable skills for them. They appreciate socialising in person but recognise that university studies must be updated to recent trends, more digitalized, and flexible.
Handbook of Research on Establishing Digital Competencies in the Pursuit of Online Learning
TopIntroduction
The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the severe disease Covid-19, was identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, China.1 The spread of infections globally caused the closure of public life, as well as education all around the world. Many educational institutions migrated their pedagogical processes online in March 2020 (Asher, 2021; Conrad et al., 2022; Karalis, 2020; Pietro et al., 2020; Veletsianos & Houlden, 2020; Watermeyer et al., 2020). It was not the first time teaching and learning needed to move online (Snelling, 2017). Johnson et al. (2020) presented cases of shifting teaching and learning online in different circumstances, such as in case of Hurricane Katrina in the USA in 2005, earthquakes in New Zealand in 2011, and student protests in South Africa in 2015. All these emergency responses were limited to a smaller geographic area. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, has caused the entire global learning community to shift to online teaching and learning for the first time (Johnson et al., 2020).
It was clear at the very beginning that universities with previous experience with the adaption of ICT in teaching and learning would move teaching and learning online more smoothly than those who needed to start from scratch (Asher, 2021; Hodges et al., 2020; Veletsianos & Houlden, 2020).
Many discussions were concerned with the negative impacts of schools' lockdown and students' learning achievements. Some of those discussions are presented in the next chapter. In the second part of the paper, the research and its results about issues undergraduate students in business school were facing during lockdown and a year after the lockdown in the so-called “new normality” are presented.
Before continuing with the description of the lockdown impact on students, we would like to present some terms used in the paper and often misused in practice.
Traditional teaching, also known as face-to-face or in-campus instruction, occurs in a real classroom, where all students and teachers are presented (Bates, 2005). The pedagogical process could be interactive, depending on the teacher's methods and the number of students attending the course. Information-communication technology (ICT) is used to present course topics and sometimes to support in-classroom interactivity. Because of teachers and students are presented at the same time in the same place, this teaching mode is recognised as synchronous teaching.
The pedagogical process could be carried out by distance teaching. This practice is known as distance education, also online education, where students and teachers are usually not presented simultaneously in the same space (Bates, 2005; Keegan, 1990; Simonson et al., 2011). This mode of study is known as asynchronous study. Study materials are delivered via different channels, nowadays mostly online; students study when it suits them. The flexibility of distance education is one of the most recognised features that are the most appreciated by part-time students. Using the modern videoconference systems, like Zoom or MS Teams, distance education becomes synchronous; students can connect with a teacher simultaneously in the virtual place (videoconference room). In this way, students can communicate and discuss as if they were in a real classroom.