Students’ concerns about Online Remote Learning during COVID-19 Pandemic in the 4IR digital society

Globally, teaching and learning in contact face-to-face universities had to transition to online learning during 2020, following the disruptions caused by COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns imposed in many countries around the world. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights from preliminary results of ongoing research focusing on students’ personal concerns raised about online learning during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa. Data were collected using a web-based survey in 2020, sampling one group of second-year university students. Internationally, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an acceleration in digital transformation for teaching and learning in many face-to-face contact universities. The key findings from the survey reported in this paper are twofold: firstly, it was found that COVID-19 has fundamentally changed both teaching and learning space geographies with large proportions of university students having to study from their homes during the lockdown; secondly, students recognised that access to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure and the unaffordability of internet connections were significant concerns for most respondents who took part in the study. The study seeks to highlight that even though the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an acceleration in the digital transformation underway in tertiary education and has drawn university teaching and learning more comprehensively into the digital era, the uneven distribution of ICT infrastructure accentuates the barriers to and inequalities that exist for students and for practical home studying. The study makes initial policy suggestions for assisting this acceleration into the digital world. Future research can build on this platform by analysing the post-COVID-19 effects in the university teaching and learning environment.